Mad To Live
by devovitquesuasartes
Summary: Desmond Miles saved the world at a terrible cost. He flees the brotherhood and sets out to create a new life for himself, but the Templars and Assassins aren't done with him yet. Contains same-sex pairings. Sequel to Thirty-Three.
1. New York City

**Introductory notes: **_This is the story that just won't die. First the epilogue that wasn't meant to be, and now a sequel. This story is set after Desmond has saved the world, and picks up six months after the end of Thirty-Three. I suggest you read that story first if you want an idea of what's going on. If you've already read it, then welcome back! This story is rated M for a reason and contains same-sex partnerships. _

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><p>The bus pulled into the Port Authority Bus Terminal at about 10am, and the final jolt of the brakes caused Desmond's head to bump violently onto the window he had been sleeping against. Still reeling from the rude awakening he stumbled to his feet along with the rest of the chattering tourists and grabbed his duffel bag from the overhead shelf before making his way off the bus.<p>

Desmond knew he needed to keep moving, but standing outside the terminal he felt as though his feet were glued to the sidewalk of Ninth Avenue. He looked up and down the busy street as the hordes of New Yorkers swarmed around him irritably, and for a moment he found himself wondering in the past year had been nothing but a bizarre dream. Abstergo, Monteriggioni, the Animus, walking around in 15th century Italy ... it all seemed so ridiculous when all around him people were walking to work, spilling hot coffee onto their jackets and trying to juggle three types of bagel whilst simultaneously talking on their cell phones.

This was why he had come back, after all the shit that had gone down in the final safe house ... the things he would give anything to forget. He had a plan, some kind of mad scheme to just pick up where he had left off. He'd saved the world, hadn't he? Didn't that entitle him to a peaceful life, even if his nights were destined to be full of nightmares?

The first thing he did was go into his old bank, the Chase on Broadway, to see how much money he had to work with. To his surprise it was about a few thousand more than it should have been. Some kind of severance pay from Bad Weather? After he had disappeared on them? It didn't make sense, but it was something he could find out about later.

He walked towards the nearest subway quickly, too quickly, trying to outpace his thoughts. He was being irrational and sloppy, leaving a trail that even a blind man could follow, let alone one of the world's biggest corporations, or one of its most powerful secret societies. In truth, he hadn't slowed down to think since he'd fled the upstate New York home in the early hours of the morning, before the others awoke. Since then he'd already used his real name when buying the bus ticket, and had shown ID at the bank just a few minutes ago. If people were looking for him, he wasn't making it difficult for them.

The 3 train into Brooklyn was ridiculously noisy, a cacophany of squeals and rattling. He was grateful for it. It drowned out the screaming in his head.

* * *

><p>Going to his old apartment had been pointless. There was someone else living there now, and presumably his possessions had either been tossed out or sold by the greasy, chain-smoking landlord. The only hope he had left was for his motorbike, which had been parked outside Bad Weather when Abstergo abducted him.<p>

He stood outside the bar now, torn between his desire to go in and pick up a shaker and start serving drunk women in low-cut tops as if he had never left, and his desire to run as far away as possible, as fast as he could. Chances were he probably wouldn't be able to get in if he tried. It was New Year's Eve and the place was rammed with revellers.

Finally realising that he didn't have the nerve to go in past the bouncers (must be new guys, he didn't recognise them), Desmond slipped into the side alley and easily vaulted over the steel fence that housed the bar's official staff smoking area and trash bag drop-off point. His sneakers (lightly built, soles with rubber grips - Assassin's shoes) hit the ground heavily. He straightened up, looked around, and the memories of this dirty square of asphalt hit him like a knife to the gut.

The scrape on his knuckles as he stubbed out a cigarette on the brick wall. The awful, sticky, stale alcohol smell of the trash bugs as he tossed them in the dumpster. The laughter as he hung out with...

"Hey! What the hell do you think you're doing back here?"

Desmond turned quickly at the sound of the angry, surprised male voice, and was disgusted to feel his body readying itself for a kill. A tall, muscular man with a shaved head and tattoos curling around his ears had just come bursting through the door with a pack of smokes and a lighter in one hand, and as Desmond stared at him his expression shifted rapidly from aggression to disbelief.

"Des? Des, is that you? Holy fuck!"

"Hi, Jerry," Desmond said weakly, and found himself being pulled into a fierce bear hug by the larger man. It felt like friendship and sincerity and smelled of sweat and cologne.

"Desmond fuckin' Houdini Miles! What the hell happened to you? We thought you were dead, man!"

"Not dead, man," Desmond replied, finding his old New York twang starting to slip firmly back into place like a kind of vocal camouflage.

"But you left your hog here! You loved that bike! Hell, when we realised you weren't coming back for it Tony filed a missing person's report. He said no way you'd just take off on us, no way you'd leave your baby..." Jerry frowned, anger now starting to overpower his relief again. "Where'd you go, Des?"

"Woah, wait ... Tony called the police?" Desmond tried to deal with that. He hadn't really given much thought as to how his kidnapping might have affected those he'd known in New York, but he'd never thought that any of them would care that much. It was a revelation, though he didn't know if it was a pleasant one.

"Is Tony here right now?" Desmond asked at last.

Jerry was staring at him. They had been close, or as close as Desmond ever let anyone get, and the skinhead was probably hurt by the way his friend was behaving. "Yeah," he said at last. "Just him and me left from when you worked here. All the other barkeeps moved on. They let us know before they took off, though," he added pointedly.

Desmond looked down at the ground and shrugged. "I got into trouble, Jerry."

Jerry nodded, deciding to leave it there. In this city, "trouble" meant anything from a loan shark to a drug deal gone wrong, and as a general rule it was usually better not to ask for specifics. He put away his cigarettes unsmoked and opened the side door for Desmond, who made his way to Tony's office with an ache in his chest.

* * *

><p>"We thought you were dead, you selfish cunt."<p>

That was Tony. He may have been the one to contact the police when Desmond went missing, but he was no soft touch with his words. He sat on the edge of his desk in an office covered in awful, gaudy modern decor as club music and the sounds of young people partying echoed through the door.

"I got into trouble, Tony."

"What kind of trouble?" Tony didn't believe in rules.

"Just trouble. I had people after me."

"Well aren't you Mr Mysterious! Give me a break, Desmond. Your life is many things but exciting and adventurous it is not. First I get the hippie cult hermit bullshit when you apply for the job, now this? Fuck off."

To an outsider, Tony probably sounded like an asshole, but his bad attitude and filthy mouth were just his way of communicating affection. At least, that's what Desmond liked to think. "I'm not gonna ask for my job back..." He started.

"Good, because I'm not offering it. I hired a Mexican girl with great tits to replace you." Tony looked him up and down and his expression softened a little. "But we could always do with a busboy. You could start again from the bottom of the pile if you want."

Desmond thought about it, but quickly realised that it would only be a matter of weeks, if not days, before either the Templars or the Assassins found him. In that moment, he finally realised that his life at Bad Weather was over. His life in New York was over. He needed to hit the road again, and fast.

"What happened to my bike, Tony?"

The bar owner sniffed. "It's in the garage, next to the walk-in cooler. You left the keys behind the bar when you took off, halfway through a shift I might add. I even got that scrap heap tuned up for you about three months ago. Knew you'd come crawling back eventually. You owe me three hundred bucks for that, by the way."

The sum reminded Desmond of the final question he had to ask. "There's some money in my account, a few grand..." He left the sentence hanging.

Tony looked up at him with his cool blue eyes, his expression difficult to read. "Yeah. Well, I figured if you were off somewhere, in some kind of trouble ... Well I at least wanted you to have a bit of cash to get you through..." He was sounding a little embarrassed. "Hell, I got way more money than responsibility, it didn't do me any harm to pay you off. No need to get all gay about it, Desmond."

* * *

><p>He filled the bike's tank, parked it in an overnight garage in Jersey City and booked a room in a hotel on the same street. The place was cheap and dirty; Desmond knew he needed to make the money he had go far.<p>

He tried to stay awake by watching TV, but the set was broken and so was the clock in the room. 2013 arrived at some point, but he didn't mark the time. Against his will, he fell asleep.

He dreamed of fire.

He dreamed of a baby, lying inside an Animus.

He dreamed of a glowing wall, of a blinding light.

He dreamed of Lucy as he sank his blade into her.

He dreamed of Rebecca, and of Shaun, and of his father and mother.

But most of all he dreamed of Clay. And it was these dreams that woke him up six times that night. Eventually he sat bolt upright in bed, burying his fists in his hair and tugging viciously as if by pulling hard enough he could yank out his thoughts as well.

"Clay," he whispered aloud, through gritted teeth, the skin of his hands stretched white over his knuckles, tears stinging his eyes. "Oh God. Clay."


	2. Jersey City

Desmond still had some Ambien that he used to take to fight the insomnia induced by using the Animus, so he got out of bed and grabbed it from his duffel bag, trying to ignore the way his hands were shaking.

He walked into the bathroom. This wasn't the kind of place that splashed out on free soap and plastic cups, so he popped a couple of pills into his mouth, twisted the tap, and leaned over so that he could scoop enough water into his mouth to swallow the Ambien, wondering too late whether it was safe to drink the water in this place.

Then he straightened up to look in the mirror, and saw the Templar standing behind him.

"No," Desmond whimpered, squeezing his eyes shut. "No, please."

He opened his eyes again. The Templar was still there, now raising a sword, readying to swing it at him. With every shred of energy he had left, Desmond forced himself not to flinch as the Templar slashed the sword brutally at his neck. In the mirror, Desmond saw the blade pass through him without leaving a mark. He was counting under his breath.

After about thirty seconds, the vision of the Templar faded away. It wasn't as bad as some of the others. When he was on the coach, about halfway to New York he'd found his surroundings blurring until suddenly he was Ezio, sitting on a bench in Florence, hood up and head down to conceal himself from the crowds. It had become Desmond's policy not to attempt to interact with his environment when the bleeding effect kicked in, so he had sat on that bench for about fifteen minutes, his body tense with fear as he slowly realised it wasn't fading away. He'd heard long-dead merchants haggling over the price of their wares, courtesans cooing at passing gentlemen, city guards walking past and cursing his name (Ezio's name, he reminded himself, not yours).

It was to be expected. Over the past few months their usual rules about extended time in the Animus had been tossed aside, and now he was paying the price. He hoped that the side effects would wear off eventually, but he had no idea if they would. All the other test subjects had died before they ever had a chance to get away from the Animus.

* * *

><p>The Ambien meant that he slept through most of the day. The nightmares were finally gone, but when he woke up the crash of memories that hit him were suddenly overwhelming. The horror, the guilt, the agony of his choices burned through his mind and forced him to get out of the bed, to grab his clothes, to run out of the hotel and keep running until the muscles in his legs burned.<p>

It was early evening and the streets were quite quiet, so he veered off into a side alley, ran towards the nearest wall and began to climb it.

He knew his behaviour was reckless. He occasionally heard cries of alarm from people in the streets below, but he ignored them. He leapt over the rooftops of Jersey City, sometimes only barely making the leaps between buildings. After about fifteen minutes his fingertips and knuckles were bruised and bleeding from the number of times they'd been smashed or grazed against brickwork. Ezio and Altair's hands had been rough and calloused from years of free running around their respective cities, but all the time in the Animus had softened up Desmond's skin and made it much easier to damage.

Finally the inevitable happened. He tried to make a leap from the top of an office building to the roof of the 7-11 next door, misjudged it and glanced off the edge of the roof before crashing to the ground in the side alley below. The asphalt tore through the elbow of his hoodie and the knee of his jeans, and he could feel blood starting to ooze out where his skin had been scraped away. It hurt, it was excruciating, and his body was trembling with exhaustion, but his mind remained no less active than it had been when he left the hotel.

Suddenly he found the side alley around him disappearing. Now he was lying on a mat in the Jerusalem Guild, the scratch of Malik's quill filling the room. Then he was lying on the dirt floor of the training ground in Monteriggioni after taking a fall. Then he was on the floor of the Animus chamber in the ancient laboratory after saving the world, clutching at his face and screaming, screaming as Rebecca ran to his side, tried to haul him to his feet, the walls crumbling around them...

Then he was back in Jersey City, and someone was trying to steal his wallet.

He heard a surprised cry as he automatically kicked the man's feet out from under him, leapt up and grabbed him by the throat before he had a chance to fall.

"Get the fuck off me! I was just trying to help you, asshole!"

"What part of helping me ended up with my wallet in your hand, you little punk?" Desmond snarled. In the midst of his anger, he realised that the tormented thoughts that had been following him around were finally being muffled.

"I was looking for ID!"

"Yeah, right." But Desmond realised that the man he was holding was just a kid really, rail-thin and terrified underneath his defiance. He released his grip on the kid's throat, expecting him to run away. Instead he stood his ground.

"I came round here to do business, and you scared my client off." The word 'client' sounded fake coming from his mouth, and Desmond noticed the stubborn jut of his chin. He guessed that the business probably wasn't drugs, but something else. "You gonna give me the money or what?" He pulled a tiny butterfly knife out of his pocket and flicked it open, holding it in his palm.

Desmond barely looked at it. The adrenaline of the fight was wearing off and his stomach turned as he felt the memories creeping up on him again. Without really thinking, he said, "How about giving me something to pay for?"

* * *

><p>He brought the kid back to his hotel room, even though he was told it would "cost extra." His stomach was churning so much that he thought he might throw up, but at least now he had something immediate to deal with, to occupy his mind. He flicked on the lights and locked the door behind them.<p>

"You leave that unlocked," the kid said sharply.

Desmond unlocked the door. He watched the other man cross the room and tried to guess his age. He looked like he was in his mid-twenties, but he was probably younger than that, aged by life on the street. He shrugged off his light jacket and Desmond saw crusted track marks on his arms.

"What's your name?"

Desmond watched the kid's eyes shift as he thought of a lie, and after a few seconds replied that his name was Joe. By that point Desmond had decided that he didn't really care.

"I don't have any protection," he realised aloud.

"I've got some rubbers. But for an extra twenty you can do it without."

"If that's your policy then we're using a condom."

"Whatever."

They stripped. They fucked. Right before Desmond came, he pressed his forehead into the crook of the kid's neck and saw the bruise of an old bite mark on the bony shoulder-blade. Then his own orgasm hit and he only just refrained from biting down himself. It would probably cost extra.

The kid pulled away a few seconds later and started climbing back into his clothes. As Desmond reached for his wallet he counted the ribs underneath the pale skin, saw the kid shivering despite the warmth of the room.

"Let me get you something to eat."

The kid paused in the middle of putting his T-shirt back on and looked over shrewdly. "Gimme an extra five bucks and I'll get a cheeseburger."

Desmond gave him the money, along with an extra five bucks. He knew it wouldn't be spent on a burger.

When 'Joe' had left, Desmond tossed the condom into the trash and lay back on the bed. His mind was filled with a slightly oily blankness now, save for a passing thought about how dumb it was to go scouting for a $30 per-night hotel to conserve money and then spend more than twice that on a prostitute.

He was physically drained but not tired, and he knew he wouldn't sleep again that night. He checked out of the hotel and retrieved his bike from the parking garage. Then he hit the road again, ready to drive all night.


	3. Thomas Nelson Highway

**Introductory note**: Thanks to Death Escapist and kinmik for your kind reviews, and thanks to everyone who favourited the story, added it to their alerts, or even just stopped by to read. Also thanks to Google Maps for helping me plan Desmond's journey

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><p>Five months ago...<p>

_A voice just behind his right ear said, "Concentrate this time."_

_Desmond closed his eyes. He wouldn't need them for this, and right now vision was a distraction. He felt the index finger touch his spine somewhere between his shoulder blades and begin to draw a line down his back. He squirmed at the sensation._

_"Keep wriggling like that and I'll end up writing in cursive. Then you'll really be fucked."_

_"I'm fucked anyway. Remind me why we're doing this again."_

_He could almost hear Clay's wry grin as he began drawing another line on Desmond's back. "It's to train your sensory perception. You won't always be able to rely on sight and sound. You need all five senses working at full capacity." He began drawing out the second (or was it the third?) letter. "And right now you're not concentrating."_

_Desmond didn't reply. He was determined to figure this one out. After a couple of minutes Clay took his finger away from Desmond's back._

_"Well?"_

_"Was it 'Templar'?"_

_"Close."_

_"How close?"_

_"Well, actually it was 'Prawn'."_

_Desmond thought this over carefully, for about half a second._

_"Are you freakin' kidding me? How the hell am I supposed to guess when you're writing random crap like 'Prawn'?"_

_"You're not supposed to guess, you're supposed to feel."_

_Desmond shook his head disbelievingly. He was sitting cross-legged on the rough makeshift pallet that Clay had built. They'd only brought enough camp beds for four people, so he'd had to improvise with some leftover blankets. Clay himself was sitting just behind Desmond. They'd been doing this exercise for about fifteen minutes, and Desmond hadn't got a single word right yet._

_"When do I get a turn, anyway?"_

_"Soon."_

_Desmond felt one of Clay's hands take hold of his forearm gently, heard the rustle of clothing and felt a slight warmth at his back as the other man moved in closer. A finger touched the middle of his back again, and he felt a mouth at his ear, soft breath stirring his hair and sending a shiver up his spine._

_"Now," Clay murmured, his lips just grazing Desmond's ear. "Concentrate."_

* * *

><p>He'd intended to go to Washington DC, for no particular reason beyond the fact that major cities were easier to become lost in. Then he'd remembered Shaun's crazy theory that the president was a Templar, and also remembered Shaun's crazy theories about a secret order of Assassins and another secret society of powerful men and women ruling the world with an invisible hand.<p>

He'd decided to skip Washington.

He'd stopped in Harrisonburg just before dawn to pick up some food and gas, but hadn't stopped driving since then. He'd forgotten how much he'd loved riding his bike, especially out on open highways like this one, the road on either side lined with lush green trees. He was planning to stop again in Greensboro, but that wasn't his final destination. Desmond was going south, as far south as his money would take him.

It was still early enough that there were almost no cars around, but now he heard the low hum of an engine behind him, getting closer. He looked in his mirror and saw a dark, shiny, expensive-looking car with slightly darkened windows. He saw the passenger window roll down, and an arm reach out to place something on the roof.

Then he heard the wail of the siren.

For a very brief moment he considered speeding up, but he couldn't tell just from looking whether he'd be able to outrun the car or not. Besides, it was probably just a cop looking to fill his harrassment quota for the day.

Desmond pulled the bike over to the side of the road, and as he climbed off he reached back to check that his duffel bag was still securely tied on. The car pulled in behind him and two men in police uniforms climbed out.

"Could you step away from the bike, sir?" one of them called as they walked towards him. He was tall and muscular, with a tattoo on his neck. His partner was smaller, not scrawny but built for speed instead of strength.

"Sure thing," Desmond said, complying. Now his Midwestern accent from the Farm was creeping back, an easy-going drawl. "Some kind of problem, officers?"

"Do you know how fast you were going there, son?" the tattooed officer asked.

"Sure do. It was about five miles under the speed limit, sir."

The officer eyed him thoughtfully. "Yeah, I guess it was." He paused. "I'm going to have to ask you to come with us, Mr Miles."

Desmond didn't bat an eye at the use of his name. He scratched the small of his back. "Am I under arrest?" he asked casually.

"Not exactly, but we have a friend who'd like to speak to you. Warren Vid-"

He didn't get to finish saying the name. He was interrupted by the 9mm bullet which shattered most of his teeth and tore through his left cheek and up through the side of his face, leaving a horrible gaping grin. As his partner frantically reached for his own firearm, Desmond whipped the gun around and fired twice into his torso, needing a target that he'd be less likely to miss.

The first bullet caught the man in his shoulder, and second in his stomach. He dropped to his hands and knees next to his friend, who was clutching limply at the wreck of his face. Desmond stood his ground and kept firing at them both until the magazine was empty and they were both lying still, flesh smeared across the highway like fresh roadkill.

The tattoo on the big man's neck was a Templar cross.

There was no point trying to hide the bodies. He didn't know how long he had until another car came along and he'd probably only succeed in leaving behind lots of forensic evidence. Desmond jumped back onto his bike and drove away as fast as he could without leaving a tire mark. About five miles up the road he wiped the gun clean with his sleeve and threw it into the trees. After he'd counted another five miles he stopped the bike again, staggered into the treeline and threw up violently. When his stomach was empty, he kneeled there dry-heaving for a few more minutes, then decided he needed to get moving again.

He got back on his bike and continued to Greensboro.


	4. Greensboro

**Introductory note:** At first I was worried about all the soft science in this story, but then I remembered that this is Assassin's Creed, where soft science rules high and mighty over all it surveys.

* * *

><p>Four months ago...<p>

_Desmond did his best to listen to Shaun, but the man was gesturing so much with his hands that privately Desmond was imagining two invisible yoyos attached to his fingertips. You had to find ways to entertain yourself, with Shaun. They were in the chamber with the glowing wall linked up to the Animus, which had become their main work area. Their own Animus, which Desmond had been using, was linked up to a generator as well as a bank of servers and computers. They'd moved it down here over a month ago, since Rebecca had had trouble creating a smooth interaction with any of the ancient Animi._

_"According to the memory that Desmond just recovered from Altair, there's some kind of flaw in Sol, our sun, which causes these massive solar flares. Now we get solar flares all the time, sometimes even several in one day, and usually the levels of energy that reach the earth are harmless. We all know how this works, right? In magnetically active regions of the sign there are higher rates of magnetic reconnection. The magnetic reconnection causes particle acceleration, the accelerated particles react with the plasma medium that forms the base chemical make-up of the sun, and the energy is released in the form of particle kinetic energy."_

_Desmond thought it was best to just nod. What worried him was that everyone else looked like they understood what Shaun was saying._

_"Usually the whole process is over in less than a day," he continued. "But what we see here is a flare originating from the magnetic centre of the sun, nearly seven hundred thousand kilometres from the surface. The accelerated particles build up, but there's no outlet for the release of kinetic energy. So instead the energy builds up in the core of the sun, and because the core is rotating at a greater speed..."_

_"So it's like a gun," Desmond blurted out, to stop the flow of words. "A huge gun that takes millions of years to reload. Right?" Out of the corner of his eye he saw Clay lift a hand to his mouth, ostensibly to scratch his cheek, but Desmond knew that he was concealing a grin._

_Shaun looked at him witheringly. "Yes, for the children in the room, it's like a great big gun, and when it goes off everyone's in very big trouble."_

_"So how do we stop it?"_

_"That's just the thing, we can't. It's not possible. The build-up of accelerated particles is already there, and the sun's going to release it as a preservation mechanism. If we tried to keep it contained then the entire sun would blow up, and that wouldn't leave us any better off. The only solution I can think of is that The Ones Who Came before must have built some kind of defense into this place, a kind of huge shield..." His voice trailed away._

_"That's all you can think of," Clay said innocently. "But Minerva and Jupiter and Juno were all much, much smarter than you, weren't they? They could have thought of something else."_

_Shaun opened his mouth but William saw another fight coming and headed it off, looking in Clay's direction with carefully contained dislike. "It's possible," he said. "It's possible that Altair found another of the temples, that there were more answers in there." He looked over at his son and Desmond's felt his good mood fading away._

_"Back into the Animus, huh?" he said, trying to sound light-hearted. He strolled over to it, clenching his fists so that the others wouldn't see how much his hands were shaking._

* * *

><p>Desmond had added another batch of grazes and bruises to his collection just before he got into Greensboro. Without warning the North Carolina countryside had dissolved away and suddenly he was Altair, riding a horse through the foothills outside Damascus. There was no way to avoid interacting this time, so he'd held onto the reins in terror as the horse galloped away from a small patrol of soldiers who were slinging arrows at him. He even felt a sting of pain as an arrow grazed his shoulder, spraying blood into his eyes and temporarily blinding him. When he'd rubbed the liquid away, he found that he was back on his bike, and a ditch was coming up fast...<p>

He limped into a diner and cleaned himself up as well as he could in the bathroom there. Looking in the mirror he saw a layer of stubble on his chin, and wondered if he should grow his beard out to better conceal his identity. He avoided looking into his own eyes, though, afraid of what he might find there. The faces of the men he had just murdered, perhaps, or memories of that last day in the Animus, of building the shield...

As he left the bathroom he passed a payphone, and wondered if he should call his father and let him know that he was safe. Despite living in such close quarters for so long, they'd never really talked about anything that had mattered. The biggest discussion they'd had was the argument, between Desmond and the rest of them, about Clay. The others wanted to send him to the surface and have him detained by the rest of the Order. William thought he was too unstable, too much of a risk to have around, and that he'd spent too much time at Abstergo for his loyalties to be assured. Rebecca found his invasion of the First Civilisation body abhorrent, considered it worse than grave-robbing, and had looked at Clay with more anger than Desmond had thought her capable of. Shaun had added snidely that Clay was too much of a distraction for Desmond.

"He goes, I go," Desmond had said simply, and that was the end of it.

Once, though, he had found his father's cell phone left unattended. He took the opportunity to open up the contacts, find the one name that mattered, and memorise the number.

He picked up the payphone and slotted a few of his precious quarters into it. His heart raced as he dialled the number and listened to the click, and then the shrill electronic ringing.

_She's not going to pick up_, he thought. _It's going to go to the machine_...

Click.

"Elizabeth Jones speaking."

Jones. Not Miles. Something was strange here, but he'd recognise that voice anywhere, though he hadn't heard it for almost ten years. He suddenly found himself unable to speak.

"Is anyone there?" She sounded a little annoyed, a little afraid. She sounded like she was about to hang up.

"Hi," Desmond said at last.

"Hello. Who is this?"

"It's me, Mom. It's Desmond."

He heard a sharp intake of breath.

"Mom, I ... I..."

"Where are you, Desmond? Your father said you left in the middle of the night after what happened. He was worried it might have had something to do with the Templars. Are you safe?"

"I'm fine, I just needed to ... get away." He waited for her to start cajoling him, telling him to go back to the safe house. What she said next came as a surprise.

"I understand. I ... heard what happened. It must have been difficult. I want you to know that I'm proud of you, so proud..." She stopped speaking for a moment. "You saved all of us, Desmond."

There were so many things now that he wanted to say, so much that had been unsaid, both when he was a teenager and then again after he left. He had so many angry, self-righteous speeches rehearsed but suddenly found that he couldn't remember any of them. Instead he asked, "Are you at the Farm? Why did you say your name was Jones?"

"It's a little complicated, Desmond. I'm not living with the Assassins any more. Did your father not tell you any of this?"

"No," Desmond said, his anger building. "He didn't tell me anything. Did you guys get divorced?"

"Oh no, not at all. We're still married, but I left because..." Desmond heard her take a deep breath. "You have a sister, Desmond. Her name's Emma. She's six years old."

Desmond stood there, gripping the phone tight in his hand.

"Desmond? Are you still there?"

"I'm here, Mom."

"When she was born ... I told your father I didn't want her raised as an Assassin. I wanted her to have the chance at a normal life. I'd already lost ... I'd already lost one child to the Order. We pushed you too hard, Desmond, and then you were gone..." Her voice cracked a little and he heard her take a few slow breaths, calming herself. "So now we live in Canada. Your father visits whenever he can, though obviously we haven't seen him for a while. When Emma's old enough I'll tell her everything and let her choose whether or not she wants to become an Assassin." She gave a small laugh. "I told your father not to get his hopes up, though. Right now she's pretty set on becoming an astronaut."

Desmond realised that he hadn't said anything for a while, that he needed to say something.

"She knows about you, Desmond," his mother continued gently. "At least, she knows she has a brother. I gave her a picture of you and she keeps it in a frame next to her bed. She thinks you live in Australia and that's why you can't come and visit." Elizabeth paused. "But I hope that you get to see her one day."

Desmond closed his eyes against the prickling of tears. He heard a beeping and realised his time was nearly up, and he was out of change. "Me too," He whispered. "I have to go now. Would you tell Dad and the others that I called you? That I'm safe."

"Of course."

"I love you, Mom." But he heard the click as he spoke and realised that she hadn't heard him.


	5. Wichita

Four months ago...

_Desmond had fallen asleep the second his head hit the pillow, which was unusual for him. The Animus sessions were far more likely to leave him restless, full of energy, wanting to run around. He'd moved his campbed to a corner of the large chamber in the end, as far away from the dormant people in the Animi as he could. Last week Rebecca had attempted to bring one of them out of stasis manually, reasoning that if Clay had managed it then it shouldn't be too hard. That was the theory, anyway._

_"They've really dug their heels in," she'd muttered tensely, after several hours of work. They'd kept trying over the next few days, with no success. It was almost as though the First Civilisation wasn't ready to face the modern world._

_Desmond's sleep was dreamless, empty, so when he woke up in the middle of the night he was half convinced that he was dreaming. Wondering what had disturbed him, he looked over and saw Clay sitting on the floor, his back against the wall. He was looking straight ahead, and Desmond could only just see the outline of his face in the pale faux-moonlight. His dark hair was as messy as always, and he was wearing only boxer shorts and one of Desmond's old T-shirts._

_"Clay?" Desmond mumbled, his voice rough with sleep._

_"I didn't mean to wake you," Clay said, still not quite looking at him. _

_Desmond rubbed a hand over his face, sitting up. As he did so, Clay bowed his head. Desmond watched him for a moment, a little nervous. Despite how close they'd become, he'd never quite rid himself of the undercurrent of fear he felt when he was with Clay. Perhaps it was because Desmond had seen him in his lowest moment, crazed and rocking and painting the walls with his own blood. Or perhaps it was because it was so rarely possible to figure out what he was thinking. Ever since they'd first met, their relationship had always had a unidirectional edge to it, and never more than when Clay was stowing away inside Desmond's brain. Clay could read Desmond's emotions like a book, but his own behaviour was so strange and unpredictable that it was sometimes difficult to tell if he was giddy with cheer or raging mad._

_Right now, he was behavingly more enigmatically than ever, but Desmond took a guess as to why he was there._

_"You wanna sleep here tonight?_

_The silhouette of Clay's face turned towards him. "If that's OK."_

_Within minutes Desmond was asleep again, molded against Clay's back as if he was simply another extension of Desmond's own body._

* * *

><p>Desmond was on the roof of the Intrust Bank Arena on Waterman Street. He was lying flat on his back. He was high.<p>

The cool stone was grounding him for now, but in truth he was scared. The climb had been amazing, almost as exhilirating as dodging the heavy security. Ezio and Altair had never had to deal with CCTV, so it was something he wasn't prepared for, but he felt he'd done well. Then, as he was sprinting across the roof and wondering whether it would be possible to make a Leap of Faith from up here, a sudden pain in his chest had sent him tumbling across the surface.

The palpitations were easing now, but the pills he'd taken were still in full effect and he could see the stars in the sky above shifting in ways that probably weren't possible. He didn't even know what he'd taken. Ecstasy? Speed? Some awful cocktail of prescription meds? He was supposed to be selling it on, to make a bit more money. The rate he was burning through it right now, he'd never make it to the West Coast.

But then the memories had hit him, sickeningly hard, and he'd grabbed the plastic baggie full of little white pills. "Pick-up pills" the dealer had told him. He'd felt like his feet had wings, like his body was weightless, like he could anything. He'd run out of the hotel ... Christ, had he even locked the door? He'd leapt onto the wall of the nearest building and started climbing, jumping between roofs like they were stepping stones. He'd found a tall office building and used his eagle vision to memorise the layout of downtown Wichita. He'd spotted the Arena and had set his sights on it with a doped-up grin.

For the third time in a minute Desmond pressed two fingers to a pulse point. His heartrate felt normal, but he could still feel the irregular thudding in his chest. "You idiot, Desmond," he scolded himself severely. Then he closed his eyes, tipped his head back and laughed until he could hardly breathe. When he opened his eyes the night sky was spinning above him.

* * *

><p>Desmond had stopped in Wichita for a few days purely because he needed a break from being on the road, but had he known who was in the city at the same time he might have blamed it on some sick twist of fate, or perhaps his own subconscious death wish.<p>

Warren Vidic paced the office of the Abstergo building in Wichita, only a dozen blocks away from where Desmond Miles was laughing himself sick on top of one of the city's most famous landmarks. Standing in the centre of the room, straight-backed and expressionless, was David Cross. Cross was head of Abstergo's Market Research Division, as it was called on their official documents. In truth, Market Research was the Intelligence branch of Abstergo's private army, and Cross himself was something between a soldier and a spy.

"Our current reports suggest that Subject Seventeen is no longer with the New York team," he stated, not bothering to follow Vidic's movements with his eyes. "Our best guess is that he was moved to an undisclosed location after the Blackout." That was the name that the press had given to last week's phenomenon, and it was as good a name to use as any.

"And we still know next to nothing about what the hell that thing was?" Vidic demanded, in a tone that suggested their lack of knowledge was excusively Cross' fault.

"The Science Division are still gathering data," Cross replied coolly. "Right now my people are focused on finding Subject Seventeen." He paused. "I mentioned there was something else we'd found."

Vidic waved a hand impatiently at him to continue.

"As you know, since Lucy Stillman was killed we have not had a source within the core team, however we do have a mole working high up in the Assassin Order who was receiving communications from William Miles. According to him, he gained an additional team member approximately six months ago. A man by the name of Clay Kaczmarek." He stopped speaking, waiting for Vidic's reaction.

The doctor tutted dismissively. "Subject Sixteen is dead. Come with me to the main facility and I'll show you the stain he left on the floor. We cut him up, took what information we could, and then burnt him. Trust me, he's not on Miles' team."

Cross shrugged. "That's the information that we have."

"It's wrong. Is that all?" He didn't sound particularly impressed.

"We'll keep working, sir." If Cross was angered or offended, he didn't show it. Vidic waved his hand in a gesture of dismissal and Cross turned and began walking toward the door.

Behind him, he heard Vidic call out, "On your way out, give that science team a boot up the ass! I want to know how it's possible for every light in the sky to disappear for six whole hours!"

* * *

><p>Desmond woke up hurting all over and freezing cold. He groaned and opened his eyes. His mouth was dry, his head was pounding, and his arms and legs ached from the work they'd done last night. He realised that he hadn't even made it back to his hotel room. He was lying on a rooftop, exposed to the harshness of the morning breeze.<p>

He used a nearby chimneystack to haul himself into a sitting position. Leaning his head back against the brickwork, he let it loll to one side, feeling the drugs still crawling through his system.

"Clay..." he rasped through dry lips.

There was a memory of Clay next to him, wearing just the old T-shirt and shorts he slept in. Desmond wondered if he was cold, but then scolded himself with the thought that memories probably couldn't get cold.

"I have this scar," the memory of Clay said softly. "On my left elbow."

Desmond knew this conversation. They'd had it three months ago. But he looked at Clay's elbow anyway and said what he had said back then.

"I don't see a scar."

"No, this guy doesn't have a scar," Clay said, and Desmond partially mouthed the words along with him, like an actor waiting for his own line. "But I had a scar. And sometimes, if I rub this elbow, I can almost feel it."

Desmond nodded, or tried to, but it was hard to lift his head again. "You feel like you don't belong," he said to the memory. He was jumping ahead in the script, he knew, but he couldn't help himself.

"I feel like I don't belong."

"Not in that body."

"Not in this body."

"Not on the team."

"Not on your team."

"But you belong with me."

"But I belong with you, Desmond. For however long we have left."

"Stay," Desmond muttered, his voice so hoarse now that it was barely audible. But Clay wasn't there and so he couldn't stay. Desmond was alone on the rooftop, cheeks rough with stubble, eyes hooded from exhaustion and his entire body aching. He climbed down the fire escape and limped back to his hotel. It was time to move on.


	6. Santa Rosa

Two months ago...

_Altair crept silently along the battlements like a ghost. He was aging now, and didn't move as fast as he used to, but he was still in much better shape and far more skilled than any of the young, strong Assassins. The Templar stronghold would be difficult to infiltrate, but not impossible._

_He dropped down onto a wooden support extending out of the wall and eyed the guard strolling beneath it, oblivious. Altair clenched his fist and his hidden blade extended through the gap where his finger had been removed. He counted in his head, waiting for the perfect moment, and then leapt off the support._

_Suddenly something went wrong. He was falling, not onto the back of the guard, but into a bright light, and before he could land he found himself lying back on some kind of bed, people all around him ... strange clothes ... and his head was hurting so badly._

_"Who are you? Where am I?" he asked desperately in the language of his people, but they looked at him blankly, then at each other with concerned expressions, and spoke to him using words he did not understand, and yet he did. Altair ... Altair ... No, he was..._

_He felt strong arms lifting him out of the strange bed, and he heard words, still in that strange tongue. Yet he could understand them._

_"... Too far. He needs to rest, he's falling apart."_

_"We don't have time for this! We'll worry about the bleeding effect later..."_

_"Yeah, that's what they said to me as well. Desmond? Come on, pull yourself together, buddy."_

_A man, surely European, fair hair ... he laughed, but didn't sound amused. "'Buddy'," he repeated. "Right."_

_Altair found himself fading away and he fought against it, terrified of losing himself, of losing his mind. He was ... He wasn't Altair. Oh, why did it hurt to much to think?_

_"Listen ... Clay." A man, an older man ... Dad. He said Clay's name with such distaste. "I understand your concern, of course I do. He's my son. But we're running out of time and he needs to..."_

_"How about you start treating him like your son, then, and stop trying to kill him? A few hours of genuine sleep won't hurt. Come on, Desmond."_

_The man with the dark hair (Clay, his name was Clay) carried Altair (no, Desmond!) to the other chamber, to the pile of blankets and clothes that Clay slept on. Desmond tried to dig himself out of the swirl of confused perceptions he was buried under, but it was as though Altair did not want to let go of his mind, as if by recovering himself Desmond was killing his ancestor. He clutched at his head and moaned, curled up on the blankets, shivering from the onslaught of confusion burning through his head. Then he felt Clay's hand on his shoulder._

_"Desmond," he whispered desperately. "Please stop. What can I do? Tell me what to do."_

_"Get away from me!" Desmond snapped, harsher than he intended, and felt the hand disappear from his shoulder immediately. Part of him needed the comfort, but Clay was too close, too intense, too distracting, and Desmond needed to think. He needed, he needed..._

_Desmond passed out. He didn't hear Clay leave._

* * *

><p>Desmond had known, going in, that this conversation wasn't going to be easy. He closed his eyes and waited for the inevitable onslaught.<p>

"Let me see if I understand this kee-rrectly, Mr Miles," Tony said on the other end of the phone, an edge of sadistic pleasure underpinning his words. "You abandon me without a moment's notice, in the middle of a shift, I might add. I get stuck with the pleasant duty of having an asshole officer of the law condescending to me about how young men are irresponsible and run off all the time. I also get stuck with your crap heap of a bike, and out of the kindness of my heart I don't sell it to buy Knicks tickets. Then you show up again a year later, no explanation, take your bike back and then charge off leaving me short-staffed _again_."

"What happened to the Mexican girl with great tits?" Desmond asked.

"...And now," Tony continued, ignoring him. "Now you have the bare-balls cheek to call me up and say that you've given my number to some guy, some bar owner in _Vegas_ of all places, and that he's going to ask me for a reference..."

"Hey, I'm a good bartender, you know that, Tony..."

"Oh, but that's not all!" Tony continued, bulldozing through Desmond's interruptions. "You don't even want me to give him a reference for _you_! He's going to ask me about some Italian fucker..."

"Ezio Federico."

"Because you're being chased by the mob or the Girl Scouts or some shit like that. How about this, Desmond. How about I tell your new boss that you're a till-dipping, shifty-eyed layabout who can't be relied upon to clean toilets, let alone pour drinks."

"You won't do that, Tony. You never tell the truth for free."

It did the trick. He heard a harsh smoker's laugh on the other end of the phone. "Good one, Liberace."

"It's Ezio."

"Sure it fuckin' is. Alright, I'll play along. But if that bar owner calls me up again in six months and starts bitching that you ran out on him and left the beer tap running, I'm gonna track you down and beat your ass until you bleed pasta."

Desmond grinned in relief. "Thanks, Tony."

"Don't mention it." There was a pause. "You really being chased by the mob, Miles?"

Desmond considered this. "I'm being chased by _a _mob. A couple of them, actually."

"Is that who came around here the other day asking after your health?"

Desmond felt a sensation like he'd just swallowed an ice cube by mistake. "What?" he managed at last.

"Yeah. Two guys came around the bar and asked me if I'd seen ya. This gray-haired guy who didn't say much, and then this big ugly fucker who was obviously trying to put a scare into me..."

"Did he have a tattoo on his neck?" Desmond asked. "The big guy?"

"No," Tony replied. "How many people you got after you?"

"What did you tell them?" Desmond persisted, ignoring the question. He could feel beads of sweat forming on the back of his neck. They could have killed Tony. They could have killed Jerry. Hell, they'd probably have killed the Mexican girl with great tits as well.

"Told them you were an unreliable fuck who broke my heart and ran away about a year ago, and that I hadn't seen you around but if they caught up with you they could feel free to break a couple of your teeth on my behalf," Tony said smugly. "And I meant that last bit."

Tony. If he talked like a complete asshole it was only a cover for what a saint he was. Were it not for the two thousand miles between them, Desmond would have kissed him. "Thanks, Tony," he said again, wishing he could say more.

* * *

><p>They called Santa Rosa a city, but in terms of population it was barely more than a village. In desperation, Desmond had stopped by the first bar he'd found and asked if they would help him out with some temporary work. He'd mixed a perfect martini for them and the young manager had tipped a wink at him and said that one of their regular bar staff was sick and they could do with the help. Once again, Desmond couldn't help but wonder if she had hired him for his looks instead of his skills, but a job was a job.<p>

It had also led to an even bigger piece of luck. A handsome Native American in a smart suit had walked in on Desmond's third night and sat at the end of the bar. Desmond was in his element, flipping every beer bottle a few times in his hand before serving it, and before long he felt the Native American looking at him.

His first reaction was to look around the bar for a weapon. The knife they used for slicing lemons and lime would probably do some damage if wielded properly. Not for the first time, Desmond wished he hadn't left his hidden blade back in New York.

Then the guy had called him over and asked for a Bloody Mary, a notoriously difficult cocktail with about fifteen different ingredients if you were making it properly. Desmond had the strange feeling it was some kind of test, and mixed a perfect BM in under two minutes.

"This is good," the man said, after taking a sip. He looked Desmond up and down. "My name's Harry."

"Hi, Harry," Desmond mumbled. He suddenly wondered if the guy was coming on to him. It had happened a few times back at Bad Weather, since it was a bar that attracted quite a mixed crowd.

This bar was pretty quiet so he started drying and stacking wine glasses. He watched Harry in his peripheral vision and noticed the sort of things that he wouldn't have thought to notice before. The strong line of his jaw, the way his hand moved over his lips after he took a sip of the Bloody Mary. Desmond wondered if, should Harry ask him, he would consent to sex. Over the past month or so he'd spent as much time as possible practicing running, climbing and jumping, and while the adrenaline was coursing through his veins he found it that it was impossible for the bad memories to surface fully. The only other times he'd felt that way were when he was high on drugs, and when he'd fucked that kid in Jersey City. Now Desmond craved the novacaine of sex with other men, and the way it made him feel so disassociated from his former self. Should he...?

"You wanna take a photo, brother?"

Desmond realised he'd been staring and looked away, though not in time to miss the sight of Harry grinning around another sip of his Bloody Mary.

"Relax, kid, I'm not cruisin' ya. I'm here visiting my mother, but next week I head back to Vegas. I own a bar out there. Tourist crap, like the rest of the city, but I make a pretty good living off it. I get the feeling you're not a Santa Rosa lifer."

"Just passing through," Desmond said after a pause.

"What's your name?"

Desmond was ready for this question, and gave the same answer he'd given the manager when she'd asked. "Ezio. Ezio Federico."

"You Italian?

"American, but I got a bit of Italian blood in me."

"Hmmm." Harry looked at him for a moment, considering. "You say you're just passing through. But when most people pass through Santa Rosa they wanna spend money, not make it. You short on cash?"

Desmond looked at him coldly. "That's none of your damn business."

Harry laughed. "I told ya, Ezio, I'm not cruising you. But you got one hell of an ego, you can mix a top-notch Bloody Mary in less time then it takes most bartenders to pour a beer, and you've got a bit of Italian blood in you. How about when you're done passing through Santa Rosa you come and work for me? In Vegas."

That was all it had taken. Las Vegas. Desmond had never been there but it sounded perfect. Bright lights, dumb people with money to burn, and a job waiting for him. It was gaudy and public, and that made it perfectly anonymous. He agreed in a second, told Harry he didn't have a CV but he could give him the number of this guy he used to work for in New York.

After Desmond got off the phone with Tony he hung up his apron, collected his wages in cash, and got back on the road. He thought that Las Vegas would be somewhere to take shelter from his past, maybe even start to build a new life for himself.

He was wrong.


	7. Petrified Forest and Flagstaff

**Introductory note**: Apologies for the times when the story gets a bit Lonely Planet. Desmond is travelling across the USA and it's a big and beautiful place. Let's make it fun, though. Let's say that if Desmond travels through your home town, you win a prize. Prize is not yet determined, but it will probably be a pen or something.

* * *

><p>Six months ago...<p>

_They were walking through the rows of Animi after checking on Arthur, the name that Desmond had given to the first baby he'd seen in the chamber. Arthur was the same as always, breathing little snuffly breaths, occasionally twitching one of his tiny hands. Desmond had come to view the infant as a symbol of hope for the First Civilisation, and was looking forward to the day when they finally figured out how to wake him up. If they pulled this off, the kid would see a sunrise for the first time. He'd be able to run through green fields, explore the cities of the modern day, go to school, grow up, fall in love ... That was what they were fighting for._

_"So does it feel different?" Desmond asked Clay. "That body? I mean, were the First Civilisation human, or were they something else?"_

_Clay shrugged, stretching his new shoulders as he did so. It had been only a week since he'd infiltrated the empty brain of the First Civilisation body and made it his own."Feels human, but like a human who ate his vegetables growing up, you know? If we don't all get burned to a crisp. I get the feeling I might live a long time."_

_There was a silence, slightly awkward, as Desmond tried to think of another topic of conversation. He realised that Clay had been leading him over to his small corner of the Animi chamber that he had set up a few days ago. "How are your quarters?"_

_"More of a nest than a bed, but I make do." They were there now, and Clay sat down on the rough blankets. The others had already settled in for the night. Desmond had spent most of the day trying to use the ancient Animus connected to the glowing wall in the other chamber, but Rebecca couldn't get her software to cooperate with it. For Desmond, at least, it had been quite a relaxed day. Days like this would soon be in short supply._

_Clay was looking up at him expectantly, though Desmond didn't know whether he was waiting for him to leave or to sit down. He did neither._

_"You know," Desmond said carefully. "If you're uncomfortable here you could always come and sleep, uh, in my bed. I know it's not that big but..." He didn't know how to finish the sentence._

_Clay looked at him, unsmiling, his piercing eyes leaving Desmond feeling naked. "I doubt the others would like that."_

_"Fuck 'em," Desmond said recklessly, and with blood pounding through his veins he knelt down on the pallet just as Clay moved forward - snakelike, with urgency - to meet him._

_The need tore through Desmond like a forest fire through dry kindling as he lost himself in Clay's hands and mouth, ran his tongue over the arch of the other man's neck to taste him, buried his nose into that messy black hair to inhale that intoxicating scent of sweat and pheremones. His inhibitions slipped away with shameful ease._

_Then he heard Shaun and Rebecca talking, remarkably close, and Desmond suddenly remembered that they were sharing a room with three other people, one of whom was his father. He swore and pulled away from Clay with reluctance. He listened tensely to the others talking for a moment, and then flopped onto his back with a frustrated groan. Clay laughed at him, and Desmond was annoyed by how relaxed the other man seemed._

_"I think we'd better just face facts here. The world is going to end without either of us getting laid ever again."_

_"Don't say that," Clay admonished. "That's way too depressing." From his sitting position he looked over at Desmond, who was still stretched out on the pallet. The two of them locked eyes and were silent for a moment._

_"Alright," Clay said slowly. "I've formulated a plan. When all this is over and we've saved the world..." Clay always said 'we' and never just 'you' - a small comfort to Desmond, who was barely avoiding being psychologically crushed by the pressure he was under. "...We're going to go back to that big fancy safe house. We'll find a room and we'll do everything I'm thinking about doing to you right now. If you have any ideas we'll incorporate them as well."_

_Desmond considered this. "You're assuming we'll live that long?"_

_"Call it a vote of confidence."_

_"I think I'll call it a great fuckin' incentive."_

* * *

><p>Before Desmond crossed the border into Arizona, he stopped in Gallup and spent all his wages from the bar work on a new passport and birth certificate, forged for him by a toothless old Mexican man who lived and worked underneath, of all places, a bowling alley. Desmond had asked about a motorcycle license as well, but the man had shook his head, sucked his teeth in over his gums and told him the cost of such an item. It had been too high, so on his bike Desmond would have to keep his own name. At least he had enough now to pass muster as Ezio Federico to anyone who wasn't looking too hard.<p>

Having spent most of his life in the Midwest and Northeast, Arizona was a place that Desmond had never really given much consideration to. In his mind it existed as a vague idea of dryness and deserts and pockets of intense religious belief, but it wasn't until he was riding his motorcycle along the I-40 that he realised just how damn beautiful the place was.

By mid-afternoon he'd found himself driving with the harsh, unfiltered glare of the sun directly in his eyes, and whether as a result of the headache-inducing brightness of the light or from pure bad luck he'd begun to see the old familiar ghosts of the bleeding effect lining the road. Worried about ploughing headfirst into a truck, he'd swung off the main highway and entered the Petrified Forest National Park.

It wasn't a forest, or at least not any more. It was a wasteland, but the landscape was covered in petrified wood and badlands, and Desmond had found it strangely soothing to stare at the densely packed layers of different-coloured rock as the daylight turned from bright white to soft orange. It was like looked at history itself, compressed. Desmond drank in the sight hungrily, hoping that one day one of his great-great-great grandchildren would use an Animus, would revisit his memories and see what he was seeing right now. Just in case, he had spoken aloud to whomever might be experiencing this with him.

"Beautiful, huh? I'm sorry not all of my memories are like this." He'd considered this for a moment, before adding, "If this place hasn't been turned into a big futuristic shopping mall, you should visit it yourself. Spend some time out of that chair, y'know?"

Satisified that he'd succeeded in freaking out any of his potential descendants, Desmond had hopped back on his bike and continued the long journey to Vegas.

* * *

><p>Had the job in Las Vegas not been waiting for him, Desmond might have seriously considered a permanent stop in Flagstaff, Arizona. That was probably something that the young locals would have difficulty relating to, but something about being buried in a wilderness of pine forests and desert was strangely appealing to him. If New York had seemed alien compared to his life with the Assassins, Flagstaff seemed to rest on an entirely separate plane of existence. Desmond sat in a diner drinking a cup of coffee, still debating whether to fork out for a hotel, sleep rough, or just keep driving all night. The latter options were equally unappealing now that the night chill was beginning to settle in.<p>

The pretty waitress stopped by his table and offered him a refill. Desmond had hesitated, but she had smiled and told him it was free of charge. Desmond never turned down free coffee, so he'd flashed his most winning smile at her and pushed his cup forward so that she could refresh it.

As she did so, a couple walked into the diner. The woman was young, with dark hair in an unflattering cut, whilst her partner was slightly older with a scruff of greying beard on his chin. They ordered a lot of food, and Desmond wondered if they'd been on the road for a while.

After about twenty minutes the waitress brought their order over on a heavy tray. Her arms were shaking a little from the weight and she had to press one edge of the tray awkwardly against her chest as she moved the plates down onto the table. Noticing her struggle, the man stood up and took one of the plates from the tray. Desmond saw the man's finger and his blood ran cold.

It bore the mark of the Assassins.

Just as he was contemplating how he might sneak out of the diner unseen, the woman locked eyes with him, frowned for a moment, and then went wide-eyed.

"Desmond Miles!" she exclaimed aloud.

_Well, shit_, Desmond thought to himself.

"I don't believe this! Come, come and sit with us!" She stood up and gestured. Reluctantly, Desmond stood up and wandered over to their table. He glanced at the waitress, who was pretending a little too hard not to listen, and realised that he would have to sit down if he was to keep the situation from getting out of control.

"Do I know you?" he asked in a low voice, taking a seat next to the scruffy-bearded man.

The man smiled and ran a finger over his brand. "We've never met, but we know of you, of course. You're the reason we're all still here." He looked at Desmond quizzically, his food forgotten. "What are you doing all the way out here?" he inquired, trying to sound casual but unable to keep an edge out of his voice. "There are a lot of people looking for you."

Desmond quickly thought of a lie. "I'm heading up North," he replied. "Up to South Dakota, where I grew up."

The man and woman exchanged a glance. The woman spoke first. "Well in that case, we'd be happy to escort you. Hell, we're duty-bound to make sure you get there safely."

"That won't be necessary."

"Oh, it's no trouble, we were headed that way ourselves."

"I'm taking a different route," Desmond said firmly.

The couple glanced at each other and apparently communicated using a very subtle kind of sign language. Now it was the male Assassin's turn to speak.

"We heard what happened in the laboratory. I'm ... sorry. It must have been hard on you. But this is why the Brotherhood exists. We support each other in times of strife..."

"And if I don't want your support, will you force it on me?" Desmond asked bluntly. Without waiting for an answer, he stood up and grabbed his duffel bag. "I'm leaving. Please ... don't follow me."

He thanked the waitress for the coffee as he passed her, and she smiled at him absent-mindedly. Outside the diner he began re-attaching his duffel bag to the back of his bike, his fingers shaking slightly. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the Assassin couple exit the diner and begin walking towards him. He waited until he was sure they were coming to confront him again before spinning round with a knife in his hand. He'd bought it from a hunting shop, and it had a sharp and cruel edge to it.

"I told you to back off," he snarled, injecting as much rage into the sentence as he could. It wasn't difficult.

The couple stopped, hesitated. Desmond knew they were probably armed, but while they wouldn't dare to kill the saviour of the planet, he quickly realised that he was prepared to kill them. As prepared as he had been with the two Templar agents.

They let him go, and Desmond drove North towards the San Francisco Peaks until he decided he wasn't being followed. Then he turned his bike back to the West and continued on his way.


	8. Las Vegas

Las Vegas was just _ridiculous_, and Desmond loved it.

His first night working at Harry's bar, The Siren, a young man and his friends had walked in. The man had very formally requested four beers. He had a parrot on his shoulder.

"Nice parrot," Desmond said.

"Thanks."

The parrot had looked at Desmond with a slightly embarrassed expression.

As the evening wore on, Desmond learned that the more expensive hotels on the Las Vegas Strip had men and women who would stand around outside, offering to grant the strangest requests that tourists could think of, provided they could afford to pay for it. Over the weeks, Desmond heard of one man who had paid for the privilege of firing a rocket launcher, and who had ended up being carried to hospital with a dislocated shoulder and an enormous grin. Someone else had requested a midget in a top hat to follow them round all evening and occasionally light their cigarettes with a comedically oversized lighter.

The young man that Desmond met that first night had been unable to think of anything he wanted, so had asked for the parrot as a joke. The runner had taken his room number and told him to wait for half an hour. Within twenty minutes he'd returned, a little out of breath, triumphantly holding up the caged bird, and the man had paid over two thousand dollars for the privilege of wearing the parrot for a night.

"I have to return him by 11," the young man told Desmond solemnly as he fed the parrot a bar nut.

The Siren was located just off the Strip, a few blocks north of Las Vegas Boulevard. It was somewhere between a bar and a club, and while the decor was conservative compared to some of the other bars around, Desmond's eyes still hurt by the end of the night from looking at all the neon.

Harry mentioned that he had spoken to Tony, with the expression that most people got after talking to Tony for the first time. But Desmond's old boss couldn't have bad-mouthed him too badly, since Harry had been true to his word and given him the job as soon as he arrived. Desmond was currently living in a cheap hotel nearby, but he was starting to wonder if he should just rent an apartment instead. Vegas felt like a place where he could settle down.

There were two problems. The first was the bleeding effect, which still showed no signs of abating. Sometimes Desmond could go for days without a lapse and would begin to think that the visions had finally stopped, but shortly afterwards he would have a day when he was barely able to function at all, so surrounded was he by ghosts and phantom buildings. So far he had been lucky and had only had one severe breakdown at work. He'd ducked out of the bar and into a backroom just in time before the world slipped away from him and he was suddenly Altair, sitting at a desk in Masyaf, poring over books. When the vision finally faded, Desmond found himself slumped on the floor being yelled at by Harry, but had managed to get away with it by explaining that he occasionally had severe migraines.

The other problem was that he'd brought his memories with him to Vegas, and they were even harder to escape from than the bleeding effect. He would run to escape them, over the tops of buildings with gaudy billboards, ducking underneath cables, scrambling over fire escapes, performing leaps that he'd never have thought possible before. He could feel his body becoming stronger, skin tightening around his muscles as he pushed them to extreme lengths, and while he was running his mind was blessedly blank. In the noise and bustle of Harry's bar it was the same, the work keeping him too busy to dwell. But when he got back to his hotel at 4am, he dreaded lying down and waiting for sleep. There was no escape then.

* * *

><p>When he had been in Vegas for six weeks, Desmond had got out of bed at dawn, only a few hours after he'd gone to sleep, and had gone into Las Vegas proper. It was quieter here, with most of the gambling and nightlife located outside of the city in Paradise, like a kind of tumour attached to the body of Las Vegas. Desmond found himself checking out the apartments in Vegas, unconsciously deciding which neighbourhoods were cheap without being slums. He hadn't run into any Assassins since the encounter in Flagstaff, so presumably his cliams about going back to South Dakota had fooled them. Perhaps he could really find peace here.<p>

By the end of the night Desmond was tired to the bone, and resolved that as long as he was working Las Vegas by night, he'd never again try exploring the place by day. It was 3am and they'd only just managed to clear out the last of the stag night parties, adulterous businessmen, and predatory-faced Vegas locals.

Itchy-eyed, his ears still ringing from the deafening music that had been playing all night, Desmond dragged himself into the washroom to scrub the stale alcohol from his hands. In contrast to the glamour of the rest of the bar, behind the scenes The Siren was dank and grimy, and the light in the washroom flickered on and off. The door was slightly ajar, and as Desmond looked up into the mirror to inspect the damage of the night on his face, he saw the crack between the wall and the door temporarily darken as someone walked past silently.

Desmond had been made stupid with exhaustion, his usual Assassin instincts dulled by the time away from the Order. Instead of creeping out of the washroom silently and following the intruder until an opportunity arose to incapacitate them, he yelled "Hey!" at the top of his voice, and barged his way out of the tiny room shoulder-first. "We're closed! You shouldn't be back here!"

The corridor was empty now, but Desmond knew that the only place that the intruder could have gone was the storeroom at the other end, so he darted towards it and swung around the corner, seeing the gun only when it was too late to do anything to save himself.

Desmond found himself fixed to the spot by the sudden terror, staring at the cruel muzzle of the heavy 9mm pistol. Too tired to try and negotiate with whoever had found him, he simply asked, "Are you going to kill me?"

Clay Kaczmarek took a step forward, so that the shadows of the storeroom left his face. "I thought I should at least have the option."


	9. The End Of The World

**Introductory note**:_ I'm pleased to say that this story hasn't strayed from the canon established in The Lost Archive DLC released this week. The DLC was actually very helpful and timely, since this chapter is written from Clay's perspective and it helped to get a better grasp of his character. I recommend playing it, even if you do have to put up with all the crap first-person platforming to get to the actual story bits._

* * *

><p>"Clay! Clay! Wake up, wake up, I've got it!"<p>

While he was still groggily trying to process the words being yelled at him, Clay felt Desmond slapping him on the cheek repeatedly. He groaned and batted the offending hand away as he struggled to wake up.

"What are you..."

"I was walking to the Animus chamber, and I got hit by the bleeding effect. It was a memory, one of Darim's. Clay, he came here! He found a message left for him by Those Who Came Before. Shaun was right, it's a shield, we need to activate a shield, and we need to do it today! Come on."

Clay felt Desmond's hand on his wrist and without warning was suddenly dragged to his feet. It was the concern that finally woke him up properly. "The bleeding effect? Desmond, how long did the vision last?"

His friend turned and looked at him distractedly. His eyes were wide, too wide, and the toll of spending too long in the Animus was written all over his face. It was in the dark shadows under his eyes and the glassiness of his pupils. Clay remembered looking in the mirror for the last time and seeing a face just like this, and his heart ached for Desmond.

"What ... the bleeding...? Clay, you're not listening! We need to go, now! Hey, _everybody wake up! _I'm going into the Animus! I have to activate the shield!" He took off at a run, and Clay could only chase after him.

* * *

><p>"I hate to say I told you so," Shaun lied smugly.<p>

"Desmond, you know our software won't cooperate with that Animus," Rebecca chided gently as Desmond lay down in it.

"I don't need the software. It's in my blood, I can do this, I can save us!" Desmond was babbling crazily, but none of the others seemed concerned. They looked excited, relieved, and William had his hand on his son's shoulder and was gazing down at him with hope and pride. Clay's stomach turned. William had once looked at him like that. It was that look which had driven him to the mission at Abstergo. The mission that had turned him from a name into a number, from a man into a subject. He was suddenly scared for Desmond, and wanted to pull him away from the Animus.

But it was too late. Desmond's eyes rolled up into his skull and the muscles in his body relaxed as his mind entered the maze of the ancient machine.

"Oh no," Shaun said, pulling a printout from the computer they had set up to communicate with the surface. "He's right. We've just received a message from the Singapore team. The solar flare is starting! If Desmond doesn't hurry..."

"He's doing his best!" Clay snapped. He walked over to the Animus and went to place his hand on Desmond's unmoving arm, only to have his own arm grabbed by William Miles and pulled away.

"Don't touch him," the older man said fiercely, his stoic mask cracking for just a second. Recovering his composure, he added, "It might be dangerous to distract him."

Clay dug his nails into his palm and glared at William, gearing himself up for another fight, but they were interrupted by the shimmer of the glowing wall, which flickered and began to form an image. A woman...

"Des, are you doing this?" Rebecca asked nervously. Desmond didn't respond.

The image on the glowing wall coalesced, and the woman's face became clear. She looked strangely familiar, and Clay remembered seeing her in one of the Animi, in the row nearest to this chamber.

"_There are few of us left now, and with time we will die out_," she was saying. "_Most of our children do not survive the birth process now, and neither do their mothers. Our bodies were weakened by the burning, but our minds remain strong, and we have the last gift given to us by the gods. We will use it ... we will use it to save you..._"

She bowed her head and tears fell silently down her cheeks. The tears were coming thick and fast, but she swallowed hard, determined to finish the message. "_They call this a place of science, but it is not. It is a sacrificial altar. Here my brothers and sisters, my mother and father, my ..._" She gasped for breath. "_My children. We will atone for our sins in blood, that you our descendants might be spared. We give ... we give.._."

The image flickered and disappeared, and at the precise same moment Desmond sat up in the Animus and gasped, a look of revulsion on his face. He looked around at each of them - Rebecca, Shaun, his father - but when he locked eyes with Clay he spoke.

"The Animi! They have another function! This place is like ... it's like some kind of battery, a generator to power the shield, but it's going to draw the power from them. Clay, it'll kill them all!"

"Twenty minutes until the flares enter the stratosphere," Shaun called out, his voice panicked. "Desmond, you need to activate the shield!"

"No! There has to be another way."

Rebecca was crying, but she managed to speak. "There is no other way. This is what the two chambers were designed for. This is what we came here to do!"

Desmond glared at her fiercely. "You're asking me to kill thousands of people!"

"We're asking you to save billions," William countered softly.

Desmond looked at each of them in turn, and then turned his head towards Clay, pleading with him.

"It's your decision," was all he could bring himself to say. He knew the others were right, but like Desmond he was thinking of baby Arthur. Only a few weeks old when he'd been put in his Animus, far too young to even know the meaning of sacrifice, curled up in the next room and dreaming of a life under blue skies, a life that he would never see. Because Desmond was going to do it, he had to, and Clay could see by looking into his eyes how much the duty horrified him. He wanted to take hold of his arm, to pull him out of the Animus and take his place, but he didn't know how to activate the shield.

"God _damn_ it!" Desmond yelled, and threw his head back violently to re-initiate his connection with the Animus. There were an agonising few minutes of silence, broken only by Shaun counting down the time until the flares hit, his voice getting higher in pitch each time.

Then it happened. The wall in front of them burst into a blinding white light as the shield was activated. The First Civilisation didn't make a sound as they died, the life drained from their bodies by the machines they were trapped in, but Clay thought for a moment that he heard a screaming. He realised that it was Desmond, his spine arching painfully within the Animus, and suddenly he wondered in dread if the person who activated the shield would also be drained by it.

Thousands of people dying to save billions. It was cruel but it made sense. But Desmond ... no, not Desmond.

Clay darted forward but William saw him and tackled him before he got halfway through the Animus. His old Master pinned him to the floor, wincing as Clay thrashed in his attempts at escape.

"Get off me!" he screamed, slamming his fist into Miles' kidneys. "He's dying!"

"I know," William hissed in his ear, and Clay felt foreign tears land on his face, mingling with his own. The man's grip was like a vice, and he couldn't escape. With his face pressed to the floor, he saw Desmond's body convulsing in the Animus, the last thing he saw before the glow of the wall burnt through his eyes, blinding him, sending him spiralling into unconsciousness.

* * *

><p>Clay woke and immediately cried out at the stabbing pain in his head. He was still lying on the floor, William Miles slumped next to him. The wall had gone dark and the only light came from the strange patterns in the wall. With a huge effort, Clay dragged himself to his feet.<p>

Shaun and Rebecca were already awake. They were crouched by the empty Animus, talking in low voices. Clay staggered over and unceremoniously shoved them aside. They'd been leaning over Desmond, who was sat with his back to this Animus, eyes staring blankly into the middle distance. When Clay touched his hand, he looked up.

"I felt them die," he whispered. Then he covered his face with his hands.

It was Clay who led them out of the laboratory, four hands on his shoulders as he held tight to the Apple and closed his eyes.

* * *

><p>It wasn't easy, getting Desmond through the safe house without letting anyone get close enough to shake his hand, but Clay managed it somehow. One look at Desmond's face told him that the man wasn't in the mood for congratulations. Word had spread fast and about half a dozen Masters had arrived to hear first-hand what had happened. They'd wanted to hear it from Desmond, and had looked at Clay with undisguised hostility when he'd fended them off.<p>

Finally the two of them reached Desmond's room on the second floor. Clay opened the door but Desmond didn't move at first. He was staring at the floor blankly. Clay touched him gently on the back to distract him from whatever hell he was experiencing and Desmond blinked and stepped into the room.

Clay leaned against the doorframe. He tried to think of something to say, but his social skills weren't great to begin with and he wasn't sure how to address someone who had just committed genocide. "You should get some sleep," he said at last. "There's a spare room a couple of doors down from here, I'm going to..."

Desmond grabbed hold of his shirtfront, pulled him into the room, slammed the door and pushed Clay up against it. Their mouths met and for a moment Clay lost himself completely and kissed back without thought, without inhibition, without a care for why Desmond might be doing this. Desmond' body was hard against his, pushing into him with insistent motions, hands finding their way into his clothes, and their mouths were pressed so close together that Clay could feel the scar that split Desmond's upper lip.

Then Desmond took a step back and in one smooth motion pulled his shirt over his head. He dropped it to the floor and stood there, breathing heavily, the muscles on his torso picked out by the low light. His eyes burned with emotion, though it was difficult to tell if it was lust or horror. He looked like a man who was running from something.

Clay picked Desmond's shirt up off the floor, looked at it for a moment, and then held it out to him.

"Put this on. We're not doing this tonight. You need to sleep."

Desmond didn't take it. He stared at Clay hard and emphasised each word carefully as he spoke. "I want you."

Clay considered this for a moment, and then nodded. "I'll stay. But put your shirt on." He put it in Desmond's hand, and the saviour of the human race stared at him for a moment before reluctantly putting it back on.

* * *

><p>It wasn't what Desmond wanted, he knew. Desmond wanted a scramble, a fuck that was more like a fight, a race to the finish line to drive him into total exhaustion. Instead they sat on the bed and Clay wrapped his arms tightly around Desmond. Before long he felt the body he clung to start to shake as Desmond began hyperventilating, and a hand clutched at his arm as the tears started to fall.<p>

For a long time that night the two of them lay side by side on the bed, barely touching, sometimes talking in low voices and sometimes just lying there in silence, fingertips tracing gentle trails over each others bodies. Gradually, when it felt comfortable, they lost item after item of clothing, sometimes helping each other to undress or sometimes just watching the other as he pulled off a sock or a shirt. Finally they were both naked, and Clay was talking about some memory they'd both experienced from Ezio's childhood when he felt Desmond's hand on his arm. He looked up, and when he was satisfied that the expression in Desmond's eyes no longer frightened him, Clay got onto his knees, leaned over Desmond and kissed him slowly.

The sex wasn't much like anything either of them had experienced before, especially so in Desmond's case. Clay lost track of time, feeling only the clutch of Desmond's hands on his shoulders, the pressure of his fingers as they buried themselves in his hair, the way Desmond's skin felt as Clay moved a hand over his flank. It seemed eternal, as though there had never been anything in the world but the two of them, and the moment they were sharing would go on forever.

When it was over, they stayed where they were, in a strange tangle of limbs. Clay was in no hurry to move and Desmond didn't seem eager to let him go. Both of them were gasping for breath, sweat-soaked and still trembling slightly, and as Clay pressed his forehead against Desmond's he heard him mumble something, a little drunkenly.

Clay placed his hands either side of Desmond's head and pushed himself up so that he was looking the other man in the eye. "Are you fucking serious?" he asked.

Desmond simply closed his eyes and nodded. Clay pulled away carefully and lay down on the slightly damp sheets. He searched for Desmond's hand and, upon finding it, grasped it tightly. After a moment he felt his fingers being squeezed in return.

They fell asleep like that. When Clay woke up, Desmond was gone. That was when the nightmare really began.


	10. The Siren

_Clay Kaczmarek woke with the sunrise, slowly. He didn't realise he was alone in the bed until he heard someone knocking on the door. _

_"Desmond?" he mumbled, sitting up and groping on the floor for his boxers. He pulled them on and had just climbed out of bed when the door opened and William Miles grew tired of knocking and came in._

_It must have looked bad, based on Miles' face as he took in the room, and afterwards Clay imagined that his own expression must have been extremely guilty. Standing near-naked in Desmond's room, the sheets crumpled, and the smell of stale sweat lingering in the air. He hadn't been able to get his hair properly tidy since he'd taken over this body so he could only imagine what kind of state it must have been in right then. William must have long since guessed that there was something more than friendship between Desmond and Clay, but this probably wasn't how it should have been confirmed for him._

_Struggling to maintain a neutral air, William asked, "Where is Desmond?"_

_"I don't know. He was gone when I woke up."_

_He didn't think about the words until they were out of his mouth. William's mouth set in a hard line. Clay realised that this wasn't going to be an easy day._

* * *

><p>"Clay? Jesus, man, put the gun down!" Desmond cried, his hands raised defensively. Clay took a step closer, keeping the gun trained on Desmond's midsection, and Desmond unconsciously took a step back.<p>

"I didn't come here to kill you, Desmond, but I swear to god if you try to run again I'll shoot you in the leg."

_This is bad_, Desmond thought to himself. Clay didn't look broken down or ill like he had right before he died. His hair was shorter now than the last time Desmond had seen him, as though he'd taken a set of clippers to it at some point, and his eyes were trained on Desmond's face with an eerie calm. He was insane, not with the babbling lunacy of before but a cold madness now, a madness that could kill.

"I'm not going to run," Desmond said slowly, keeping his hands raised. He stepped away from the door and walked around to the back of the storeroom, Clay moving around with him until he stood between Desmond and the only exit.

Clay surveyed him analytically. The eyes of the First Civilisation body he now inhabited were brown but there was no warmth in them, and Desmond thought for a moment he could see the pale blue of Clay's real eyes gleaming through them. His next words were soft, but not gentle. "But you _did_ run, Desmond."

Keeping his hands up in a placating manner, Desmond consented. "I know. I know I ran. I'm sorry, Clay, I..."

"Don't apologise, Desmond. I should thank you. I didn't realise until you'd gone just how much you were protecting me from the others. Then, when you left..." He left the sentence trailing, waiting for Desmond to follow it to its logical conclusion.

Desmond felt the truth wash over him in an unpleasant wave. "Oh no," he murmured. "They blamed you."

* * *

><p><em>Clay stared down at the formica wood-pattern of the table. "I told you a thousand times already," he growled. "He didn't tell me where he was going. I didn't do anything to him. I'm not a Templar."<em>

_"Fact is, we don't know what you are," William Miles said. He was leaning against the wall, staring at Clay coolly. "You claim to be Clay Kaczmarek, but Kaczmarek is dead. He died after offering the Templars unlimited access to his DNA, after giving them unlimited opportunities to study his behaviour-"_

_"That was the mission!" Clay screamed, finally losing control. He strained at the cuffs which bound his hands behind his back. "That was the mission that _you _gave me!"_

_"It would have easy," William Miles continued, raising his voice to be heard over Clay. "It would have been easy for them to create an artificial intelligence program designed to simulate the image and behaviour of Clay Kaczmarek. A virus, which infected Desmond Miles before he escaped Abstergo. A virus with the power to influence his actions, perhaps even with enough power to force him to kill Lucy Stillman and induce a coma..."_

_"You have no evidence for this, this is wild speculation!"_

_"And yet you claim to be a ghost, capable of possessing other living bodies. Where's your evidence to back that up?"_

_He was a cold bastard, and Clay knew that he had to find a way to get to him. If William Miles got his way, Clay would be tortured for information, perhaps even executed as a spy. He glanced at the other Master Assassin in the room, who was sipping coffee nonchalantly from a polystyrene cup. His name was Michael Halliwell, one of the older Masters who had a cover job working for the FBI. It made him good at situations like this, and it also meant that he would recognise the signs of an investigating officer losing his objectivity._

_"You want evidence, Miles?" he asked, slowly turning his gaze back towards Desmond's father. "Before Desmond left, he told me that he loved me. So according to you, your son is in love with a computer program..." He grinned evilly. "Or maybe he just really liked the way I fucked him."_

_William looked up at him sharply. He didn't lash out with his fists, though Clay could see in his eyes how much he wanted to, but Halliwell saw his mask crack and Clay knew it was over. William Miles left the room and didn't come back._

* * *

><p>"Did you mean it?" Clay demanded, still keeping one finger poised on the trigger of the gun. Desmond could have sworn he heard the creaking of the mechanism inside it. He was millimetres away from death, and he knew what Clay was asking.<p>

He tried to play dumb anyway. "Did I mean wh-"

"You know what," Clay interrupted, raising the gun slightly. "Did you mean it, or were you just saying it because I had my dick inside you?" He said it sarcastically, but Desmond thought he saw a shadow of emotion pass over his face and realised that Clay hadn't descended all the way into madness.

Desmond looked him in the eye. "I meant it," he replied truthfully, his words soft and sincere.

It clearly hadn't been what Clay wanted to hear. His face contorted and the gun shook in his hand a little.

"Then _why_?"

* * *

><p><em>Clay sat on Desmond's old bed, the bed where they'd slept together just a few nights ago. Without warning he'd been released by the Assassins, but no one had told him why he was suddenly free of suspicion. William Miles had already left, gone up to Canada for some reason, and none of the other Assassins would even look him in the eye, let alone talk to him.<em>

_It was agony. Was Desmond dead? Had they found his body? Had Abstergo sent a ransom note? No one would answer his questions. Most of Desmond's clothes were gone, along with his duffel bag. What did that mean?_

_Someone at the door cleared their throat. Clay looked up to find Shaun leaning against the doorframe._

_"Alright, mate?" he asked awkwardly._

_"Since when am I your ... mate?" Clay asked bluntly. He'd once 'accidentally' taken over Desmond's body and attempted to throttle Shaun. You could say that they'd got off to a rocky start._

_Shaun rolled his eyes and became his usual abrasive self. "Alright, so I think you're a twat, but I know that no one will tell you what's going on. They didn't want me telling you either, but you meant a lot to Desmond and I think you deserve to know."_

_"Know what?"_

_Shaun took a deep breath. "We got a call from Desmond's mother this morning. Apparently he called her to play catch-up, and asked her to pass on a message that he was OK. He hasn't been kidnapped, he's just run off. Again." He said the last part scathingly, but Clay barely heard him. There was a pressure building up in his chest, a roaring in his ears, and it was all too horribly familiar._

* * *

><p>To keep himself thinking straight, Desmond decided to take it for granted that Clay wasn't going to shoot him. If he was proved wrong ... well, at least he wouldn't get much of a chance to regret it. He lowered his hands and began to explain.<p>

"You don't know what it was like. At least you chose to join the Assassins. For me, it was like they'd decided from birth who I was going to be, what I was meant to do, and every time I tried to take control of my own destiny I got ... slapped down. Like I was messing it all up. That was why I ran away the first time. I just got sick of being a ... a thing. I wanted to be more than just the tail end of an ancestry."

Clay shook his head angrily, impatiently. "That's not what I asked."

"I know, I'm getting there." Desmond took a deep breath, forcing himself to dredge up the memories that he'd spent months trying to bury. "After what happened ... No one criticised me. No one told me I'd messed up, even though thousands of people were dead. My father, Rebecca, Shaun ... They were upset, yeah, but they looked at me with this ... _pride_." He spat the word out in disgust. "Everyone was suddenly all ready to pat me on the back for fulfilling my destiny. For becoming a mass murderer." He looked up at Clay, rife with confusion and anger. "Isn't that _sick_?"

Clay stared back at him mercilessly. "What about me?" he asked. "Did I look at you with pride?"

No. He hadn't looked at him with pride. The way Clay had looked at him had been much, much worse. Desmond had grabbed him and kissed him in the hope that Clay would fuck him roughly and hurt him, deliver the pain and punishment he so badly needed to feel. Instead they had crossed a line together with the worst possible timing; Desmond had realised that he was in love precisely when he needed more than ever to be hated.

He couldn't say any of that, so instead he skipped ahead in the story. "You should probably know. After I left I went to New York, and then to Jersey City. When I was in Jersey..." Desmond averted his gaze. If Clay shot him, he didn't want to see the bullet coming. "I paid some guy..."

"His name was Mikey Sanchez."

Desmond looked back at Clay, but the other man's face was like stone. He took in Desmond's expression and drew the obvious conclusion from it.

"You didn't even stop to find out his name, did you? It took me a while to find you, Desmond, and I had to track you every step of the way."

* * *

><p><em>The kid scratched at the inside of his elbow and looked at Clay twitchily. "I don't talk about my clients. That's classified information." He eyed Clay's clothes, trying to get an idea of how much money his interrogator might have. "Unless you wanna pay me for it."<em>

_Clay took a step forward, backing the kid against the brick wall of the side alley. He pressed one hand against the brickwork to block any chance of escape, and his eyes glittered dangerously. "I'm not paying you," he said simply._

_Mikey Sanchez gave in. Nothing was worth this hassle. "Fine. I found him all curled up in an alley and I helped him back to his hotel. Like a Good Samaritan. Then he said he'd give me sixty bucks if I let him fuck me, and I wasn't about to turn it down." Mikey coughed, turned his head, and spat slightly bloody phlegm onto the asphalt. "Shoulda charged him more, it was pretty brutal. I didn't even get off."_

_Clay took his hand away from the wall slowly, not looking the kid in the eye. "Did he say where he was going?" he asked quietly._

_Sensing the danger in the air, Mikey decided to be as helpful as possible. "No, but there was a road map for Greensboro on the table."_

* * *

><p>Desmond was leaning back against some shelves now, staring up at the ceiling, bathing masochistically in the pain of the memory. "After we were done," he said dreamily. "The guy looked at me with this ... this total fucking <em>disdain<em>. Dismissal. Like I was nothing to him, less than nothing." Desmond gave a horrible, choked laugh. "It felt so goddamn _good_ to be looked at like that. It was exactly what I needed, you know?"

It seemed that Clay did know, for that was how he was looking at Desmond now. With total fucking disdain. He wasn't even bothering to point the gun any more, and the arm holding it was limp at his side.

Desmond didn't care. He felt a sudden urge to drive Clay further away from him, to feed the fire of his hate.

"I killed Arthur," he bit out. "I killed that little baby, Clay. I f-felt ... I felt each one of them go as I fed them to the shield and Arthur ... he w-wasn't even scared. He saw the light ... he must have thought I was waking him up."

This wasn't going to plan. Clay wasn't looking at him with disgust or hatred. The cold neutrality of his expression was finally fading, but he was looking at Desmond with ... pity. Not just pity but...

"I killed Arthur!" Desmond repeated, screaming now. He darted forward and grabbed Clay's hand, the one holding the gun, and lifted the weapon up so that it was pressed against his chest, directly over his heart. Desmond closed his fingers over Clay's, trying to put enough pressure on the trigger to fire.

"So shoot me then!" he hissed. "Shoot me, Clay! Avenge them."

"Ezio?"

Both of them froze. It was Harry, obviously coming to investigate the commotion. He had reached the corridor outside and was getting closer by the second. Clay pulled his hand away from Desmond and stared at him for a moment before tucking the weapon into a holster under his jacket.

"You make me fucking sick, Miles," he said quietly. Then he left, knocking into Harry as he passed through the door. The older man stared at him as he passed, didn't try to stop him. He was far more concerned with Desmond, who was standing in the middle of the storeroom and staring at the door like a man staring into the gates of hell.


	11. Enterprise

**Introductory note**: Here's something that I should probably clear up, since a character from an earlier chapter is going to be making a reappearance soon. When I wrote David Cross into the chapter 'Wichita', I picked his last name purely because the symbol of the Templars is a cross. I suspect that's probably the same reason that Daniel Cross was called so in the comic book mini-series. Thing is, I didn't know anything about Daniel Cross until someone mentioned him in a review, which prompted me to do a little research on the Assassin's Creed Wiki.

So yeah, sorry for the confusion, but as I wrote him David Cross had no connection with Daniel Cross whatsoever, and since I haven't read the comics I probably won't be writing Daniel into this story. The best I can offer is the possibility that Daniel and David are somehow related, and if I ever get around to reading the comics he might get his own story.

* * *

><p>One month ago...<p>

_The phone rang for a long time, long enough that he began to doubt anyone would ever pick up. Finally he heard the click, and the gruff voice at the other end._

_"Hello?"_

_Just "hello". Not "Kaczmarek Construction". Clay wondered what had happened to the business, whether it had finally collapsed altogether. His father was too young to qualify for retirement. Had he gone to work for someone else?_

_"Hello? Hello? OK, I'm hanging up. Fuck you, whoever you are."_

_"Don't hang up, please." He did his best to disguise his voice, which had remained much the same despite the fact that he'd acquired a new voicebox, but he thought he heard a sharp intake of breath from his father._

_"Who the hell is this?" It sounded like he was slurring his words, though it could just be a bad connection._

_"Is that... Is that Kaczmarek Construction?"_

_There was a bitter snort of laughter. "Not any more. You're using an old phone book, pal. Goodbye."_

_The line went dead, and Clay hung up the phone slowly. It was probably for the best. The only body his father would recognise was long since gone, and beyond that he had no evidence to prove that he was Clay Kaczmarek. That bastard William Miles had laid the seeds of doubt in his mind, and frequently now Clay wondered if he really was just some kind of virus created by Abstergo. Was their programming advanced enough to create an artificial intelligence good enough that it could believe in its own sentience?_

_He could feel himself unravelling, and so he clung to the only thing he had left. He had to find Desmond Miles._

_He stepped out of the diner and onto the streets of Greensboro. This place had been a dead end, but he knew where he was going next. It would require some deft work and all his skills to cross the border without a passport, but he was taking a trip up to Canada._

* * *

><p>Desmond closed the door to his hotel room and slid down it. He put his head in his shaking hands and took several deep breaths. He reminded himself that he should be relieved that he'd finally tied up all the loose ends with Clay, and that he now had one less ghost following him around.<p>

_You make me fucking sick._

There was something he needed to think about, though. Something he needed to address. He touched a hand to his chest, to the spot where he'd shoved the muzzle of Clay's gun. He'd asked Clay to kill him and he remembered wanting it, _really _wanting it, and that scared him. Desmond wasn't suicidal, and he'd never thought he'd be capable of asking for death. The survival instinct was bred too deeply into him, and his desire would always be to fight and not to die, no matter how much he might despise himself.

But in that moment he remembered tightening his fingers on Clay's hand and trying to pressurise the trigger, trying to fire that bullet straight into his own ravaged heart.

Would he ever have control? All these actions he had taken - becoming an Assassin, using the Animus, killing Lucy, exterminating the First Civilisation, pushing that gun against his own chest and trying to kill himself - none of them felt like a choice he had made, but something that he had been forced into by birth or fear or circumstance or plain old-fashioned mind control. His own life now felt no different to reliving the memories of his ancestors and watching their lives unfold passively.

The only decisions he could ever be sure that he had made for himself were the decision to run away and the decision to become a bartender. He had to hold on to that. It might be a shit job, and he might waste the rest of his life pouring beers for the desperate and miserable, but at least it would be a path he had chosen for himself.

* * *

><p>He had to apologise to Harry profusely just in order to keep his job. For want of a better lie he'd said that Clay was a cousin of his who had been visiting Las Vegas, and that the argument in the storeroom had been over something trivial. Harry, shrewd as ever, hadn't believed a word of it.<p>

"If you're in some kind of trouble, Ezio, then you need to tell me," he'd said, searching Desmond's eyes as if he could find the truth there. "This is the second time you've lied to me. I know what a migraine looks like and what happened to you the other day wasn't a migraine. I took a chance on you, kid, so do me a favour and start giving me some answers."

Desmond met his gaze, with the full knowledge that it would make it impossible for him to lie convincingly. "I had some ... history following me around, Harry. I honestly wish I could tell you about it, I do. But it's gone now."

It was. The next day Desmond put down a deposit on the cheapest one-bedroom apartment he could find. It was in Enterprise, a town outside of Las Vegas and a short drive from where he worked. The apartment came with furniture, but he found a bookshelf, a cabinet and an old TV that were going cheap at a local pawn shop.

A week after Clay's visit Desmond was enjoying his first full night in his apartment, since it was finally his day off. He grabbed a can of beer from the fridge and flicked the TV on, sitting down in the raggedy old chair that had come with the apartment. There was some kind of talk show on. He didn't recognise the host or the celebrity guest, but the audience seemed to be going pretty wild for both of them. He listened to them talk, could understand the jokes, but didn't join in with the laughter. There was a faint buzzing sound in his head, accompanied by a dull pain.

"Well, I think it's about time to bring on our next guest, and I want you all to get very excited. Come on, get on your feet and put your hands together for ... Sef Ibn-La'Ahad!"

That got Desmond's attention.

He sat up straight in the chair and stared as Sef walked onto the stage in full Assassin garb while the studio audience went wild, cheering and stamping their feet. He laughed and raised his hands modestly as he sat down on the couch next to an A-list actor.

"What ... the ... fuck?" Desmond said slowly, staring at the screen. The bleeding effect seemed to have taken a new and supremely weird turn.

"So, Sef," the host said, when the cheering had died down. "First of all I think congratulations are in order. I understand you recently carried out an extremely successful assassination on a Templar leader. Tell me, how did it feel to sink your blade into his throat? A story to tell the grandkids about, I guess!"

Sef laughed good-naturedly and the audience chuckled along with him. "Well, taking a life is never a good thing ... though it sure does feel like it sometimes!" He winked at the host. "What's really important to me right now is my family."

The audience gave a collective "Awww!"

"I have a beautiful wife and two daughters. Then there's my older brother, Darim, who I've always looked up to. My mother, and of course..." Now he looked directly into the lens of the camera, out of the TV set and straight into Desmond's eyes. "My father. I owe everything to my dad. If it wasn't for Altair, I probably never would have had to kill anyone. I could have had a happy life. And this wouldn't have happened."

No sooner had he spoken than three arrows hit him solidly in the chest. The host made a comedy wincing face and the audience laughed and applauded as if Sef had just pulled a hilarious stunt. The young Assassin lay slumped on the guest sofa, blood turning his robes from white to red.

Now it was the host's turn to look into the camera lens. "Well it's interesting you say that, Sef, because it just so happens that..." There was a surprised, delighted gasp from the audience. They knew where this was leading. "...Yes, your father is here in the studio today!"

Sef sat up abruptly. Blood drooled from the corner of his mouth but he didn't bother to wipe it away. He stared straight out at Desmond and then suddenly he was no longer on the TV. He was in Desmond's apartment, standing in front of him, close enough that Desmond could see the ragged edges of flesh around the arrows in his chest. Desmond practically fell out of his chair and staggered backwards until his back was against the wall. Sef walked forward with deadened eyes until he was very close.

"Thank you," he hissed, and his breath smelled awful, as if with each word he was expelling fumes from his rotting insides. "Thank you, father. My daughters will forget my face as they grow up. Thank you. My own brother will end up in my wife's bed." He grabbed Desmond's shoulders and pulled him into a painfully tight embrace, his flow of words now falling directly into Desmond's ear, pressed so close that Desmond could feel the smear of Sef's blood as it dripped onto his neck and the press of the protruding arrows against his own chest, digging into him. "Thank you, father. I will never see my grandchildren. Thank you. Thank you."

Desmond struggled against the grip, but it was hopeless. "Get off me!" he cried. "I'm not your father!"

"Thank you. Thank you. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry ... Oh my poor boy ... My poor son."

The arrows were digging into his chest harder than ever, and as Sef pulled away Desmond looked down and saw that they were inside him, pointed ends penetrating with the feathers flowering out from his shirt. Then he felt the pain and he fell to his knees, clutching helplessly at his chest, looking up at Sef. Only it wasn't Sef. It was Altair.

"I'm so sorry, my poor boy," he was saying, and tears rolled freely down his face. "What have they done to you?" Altair knelt down in front of Desmond and cupped his cheek as Desmond coughed and felt blood filling his lungs. He looked down at the arrows in his chest, and then back up at Altair, desperately.

"No," he whimpered. "I don't want to die. Don't let me die."

"But Sef, my poor boy..." Altair's face shifted and suddenly it was Desmond's own father looking at him and touching his face.

"You're already dead," said William Miles.

Desmond woke up screaming.


	12. Bruce Woodbury Beltway

**Introductory note:** Just a quick shout-out to all my wonderful reviewers for keeping me motivated. NariMorin, it's good to have you back and I'm glad you like the sequel. Ziraealwiggin, amazing that you read the whole thing in one go, and I may have to go back and do the same at some point just to make sure it all makes sense. Vittoria Agli Assassini, I'm very flattered that I brought you out of hiding and I hope you enjoy the rest of the story. Evil-windful, hope you're still enjoying the writing. And Death Escapist, thanks as always for your ongoing support of the story. Finally, thanks to everyone who favourited, added it to their story alerts or just took the time to read.

* * *

><p><em>Eight weeks ago...<em>

_Clay had been sitting on a bench across the road from the house for almost half an hour, just looking at it. It wasn't what he had expected, but then perhaps he should have known that the Assassins would have chosen something nondescript. It was a small, slightly shabby semi-detached, with a mailbox at the end of the driveway with the name 'Jones' on it. There was a car in the driveway, ten years old at least and none too fancy when it had been new._

_The front door opened and a little girl ran outside, picking up a bike that was lying haphazardly on the lawn. Luckily for Clay, the Scarborough neighbourhood was of the kind where parents felt safe to let their kids play out front, but there was still the concern that the girl's mother could be watching. He could only hope that she wasn't twitching the curtains to keep an eye on her daughter._

_"Hey, kid," he called out to her, waving a hand._

_The girl looked up. From afar he could see that she didn't bear much resemblance to Desmond. Whereas Desmond must have mostly inherited his mother's looks, the girl had William's colouring. She looked both ways (smart, too) before crossing the road on her bike. She stopped in front of him, out of arms reach, and looked at him apprehensively. Oh, but she had Desmond's eyes. This couldn't be anyone else._

_"Hi," he said. "Are you Desmond's little sister?"_

_She nodded, smiling at last. "You know my brother."_

_"Sure do," Clay said, grinning back at her. "We're old pals. Is Desmond at home?"_

_"Yup."_

_Clay's heart stopped for a moment. "Can you go get him for me?"_

_The girl laughed and shook her head. "I can't swim that far!" she exclaimed, as if Clay had asked her something ridiculous. Seeing his blank stare, she added, "Desmond lives in Australia."_

_Clay mulled this over for a moment. Was it possible that Desmond had left the continent to escape the Assassins? "When was he last here?"_

_"Desmond never comes to visit. He's a koala farmer so he doesn't have enough money for plane tickets. Mom says there's no money in koalas." Desmond's sister pouted. "I write to him loads, but he never writes back. You don't sound Australian," she added accusingly._

_"That's because he's not," said a voice to Clay's left. He felt his heart sink as he forced himself to look over and saw William Miles come around the side of a parked van next to them and pin him down with a stare. It was frightening, not because there was any anger in his face, but because he looked so horribly calm._

_"Go back inside, Emma," the older man said softly. "I need to have a grown-up talk with Desmond's friend."_

* * *

><p>Desmond had been an idiot to think that he could banish Clay Kaczmarek from his life with only a few words. Though a month had gone by since their encounter, it had become impossible to think of anything else, and the realisation that Clay probably wasn't thinking of him was no comfort at all. Desmond worried about where he had gone, what he would do with no money and no means of earning it, wearing a face that his old friends and family wouldn't recognise. Technically the body he was in now was an illegal immigrant to the United States, albeit an immigrant from underground rather than overseas. Added to that was the fact that, for as long as Desmond had known him, Clay had never exactly been mentally stable. The most normal he'd ever behaved was in the laboratory, when he and Desmond still had ... whatever it was they'd had. Now he was on the loose with a loaded gun and a lot of anger. The thought was troubling to say the least.<p>

Beyond the worry, Desmond simply missed him. As he poured drinks in The Siren night after night he found himself unconsciously peering into the crowd of people in the hope that he would somehow see his face. He saw men who looked like Clay, both in his old form and his new one, but it wasn't Clay's face that Desmond had fallen in love with and he knew that even if he pursued those men and brought them back to his apartment, he'd never be able to convince himself that he was doing anything other than sleeping with strangers.

Still he ran and jumped and climbed over the rooftops of Las Vegas, narrowly escaping arrest on a number of occasions and once almost tumbling to his death from a crane atop the Fontainebleau Resort. After struggling a little with the many glass surfaces of the city skyscrapers he'd customised a pair of gloves to aid with climbing over smooth surfaces. By now he had started running purely for the pleasure of it and for the sensation of freedom it gave him, the thrill of recklessly breaking all the rules. He'd ended up in the local papers once, after one too many sightings, but since he always kept his hood up on these excursions the blurry photo wasn't enough to identify him with.

Usually he would go running after he finished work, and return to pick up his bike from the bar at around four or five in the morning. If Harry wondered about this then he never questioned it. Harry had stopped questioning Desmond, but would often stare at him thoughtfully. The bleeding effect certainly wasn't helping.

"Give me a flagon of cider," a customer had asked him once at the end of a long night, when the bar was nearly empty. Without really looking at him, Desmond had pulled a bottle out of the cooler, poured it, and pushed it over the bar towards the man.

"That'll be eight dollars fifty," he'd said.

"Ezio?"

Desmond had looked over and seen Harry standing behind the bar, frozen in the process of grabbing a wine glass.

"What is it, Harry?"

"Who are you talking to? Who's that drink for?"

Desmond must have looked at him like he was insane. He had looked back at the customer, and realised that the man was dressed in the height of Renaissance Italian fashion, complete with a feathered cap. He had nodded thanks at Desmond and, from where Desmond had poured the drink, had picked up a phantom flagon of cider and walked away with it, dissipating as he went. Desmond was left standing at the bar with the glass of cider in front of him and Harry waiting for an answer.

He'd offered to let Harry take the price of the drink out of his wages, but the bar owner had merely shaken his head and taken the cider away. Perhaps he thought Desmond had been dipping into the alcohol already. More likely he'd long since concluded that 'Ezio' had a drug problem, which caused hallucinations and occasionally total breakdowns. Desmond often wondered why Harry hadn't simply fired him weeks ago, but he supposed that when he wasn't acting crazy he was a damn good bartender.

Riding his bike back to Enterprise after the incident, too tired to do anything other than go home and sleep, Desmond saw a car broken down on the Bruce Woodbury Beltway. The driver was bent over with his head under the hood. Desmond noted it with a mild feeling of _schadenfreude_ and smugness over the reliability of his own bike, but as he was about to drive past the metal bar propping up the hood suddenly gave way and the sheet of metal came crashing down heavily on the man's shoulders and head.

That did it. He wasn't completely heartless. Desmond pulled his bike over in front of the car and took his helmet off, laying it on the seat. "You OK, man?" he called out, half-jogging towards where the man was swearing and rubbing the back of his head.

"Goddamn Japanese-made piece o' shit," he growled, looking up at Desmond. His age was difficult to determine, since his hair was a shade of brown that was almost grey, and his face was slightly rough and weathered, but he must have been handsome in his early youth. "Thanks for stopping, man. You know anything about cars?"

Desmond shrugged and gestured towards his motorcycle. "Sorry, anything more than two wheels and I'm lost. Your head OK?"

"Got a chicken egg growing there that's going to look just beautiful by tomorrow morning, but I'll live. Guess I'm lucky anyone stopped at this time of day, though I certainly wouldn't have complained if you'd shown up driving a tow truck." He reached into the engine and pulled out an oily rag that he'd obviously dropped when the hood had collapsed on him.

Desmond turned and looked up and down the beltway, but the man was right; at this hour it was completely deserted. "Sorry, man. I could give you a ride to the nearest garage, ask them to tow your car..."

Too late he heard the rush of movement behind him and smelt the eye-watering chemical stink of the damp rag as it was clamped over his nose and mouth. Without thinking he tried to gasp for breath, which only drove the fumes faster into his lungs and then into his bloodstream. His vision blurred and he scrabbled weakly at the hand holding the rag to his face. Desmond fought the loss of consciousness every step of the way, but it did no good.

David Cross kept the chloroform-soaked cloth pressed hard against Miles' face for at least thirty seconds after his body went limp. The last Abstergo operatives who had underestimated the man had paid for their foolishness with their lives. He opened the passenger door of the car and grabbed a roll of duct tape, using it to swiftly bind Desmond's hands and legs before bundling him into the back seat.

Satisfied that his prisoner wasn't going anywhere, Cross climbed back into the car. The engine started smoothly, with a soft purr, and Cross smiled to himself. He loved Japanese engineering.

When the sun rose on the Bruce Woodbury Beltway, Desmond's bike was still sitting abandoned at the side of the road, a small black speck in the yellow expanse of the desert.


	13. Abstergo

One month ago...

_"I'm begging you."_

_The bar owner wasn't looking at him. He was filling in paperwork at his desk, and had been doing so ever since the first time he'd asked Clay to leave._

_"I know he came through here, and I know he would have stopped at this place. I have nothing to do with the other guys who came looking for him. I ... we..." He took a deep breath. "Desmond is my ... he's a friend of mine."_

_Realising that he wouldn't get any peace until he responded, Desmond's old boss sighed and tossed his pen onto the desk. "You were fucking, you mean?"_

_Clay met his gaze without flinching. "Not with any degree of regularity."_

_"And now he's fucked off and left you, you want me to help you track him down so you can go weep on his shoes and beg him to take you back?"_

_"I just want some answers." Clay considered the man in front of him for the moment. "He did the same to you, didn't he? Last year."_

_The bar owner gave a rough laugh. "Even if I swung that way, I don't screw the people who work for me. I tried it once and all you get is pillow talk about a pay rise."_

_Without being invited, Clay sat down in the chair on the opposite side of the desk and folded his arms. "He never told you what happened to him, did he?" He took in the shift of expression that met this statement, and concluded that he was right. "Tell me where he is now. I swear I'm not going to hurt him. And I'll tell you where he's been for the past year."_

_There was a very long silence while each man tried to stare the other down. Tony blinked first. "Alright, fuckface, he's working at a bar called The Siren, just off the Strip in Las Vegas. Now tell me what happened to him. Why did he leave?"_

_Clay smirked and stood up. As he strolled out of the room he called over his shoulder, "You want to know why Desmond left? It's because he thought you were too fucking gullible."_

* * *

><p>Desmond's nose burned from the residue of the chloroform. In fact, he woke himself up by sneezing. His vision blurring from the water in his eyes, he sat up abruptly, panicking as the memories of the attack came flooding back. He was on a hard shelf of a bed, jutting out from the wall in what looked like some kind of cell. The walls were slightly padded and the corners of the bed were all curved. It was the sort of room where you would keep someone who had reason to attempt suicide. There were obviously cameras installed somewhere as well, for no sooner had he woken up than the door opened and the man with the broken-down car stepped in, accompanied by a guard with a gun.<p>

"Hello, Desmond," he said.

"How's your chicken egg?" Desmond replied groggily.

"Just fine, thank you. I suppose you know who I am. Or at least who I work for."

"Do you work for the Colonel? I swear I've only worked out five of his secret herbs and spices so far."

The man didn't smile. "You are coming with us. Stand up and follow me. If you attempt to escape you will be shot in the spine. Our intentions for you mean that your ability to walk is not a necessity."

Desmond stood up and took a step forward, invading the man's personal space. "So you're putting me back in the Animus?" he sneered. "You might as well just shoot me. I'm not going to show you anything."

The man met his gaze coolly. "Your cooperation is not a necessity either."

* * *

><p>He was led down white corridors and past windows through which he could see a city sprawled out beneath him. He watched the people in the streets and wondered if they would hear him if he broke free and started pounding on the windows. But he was at least 30 floors up, and the people he saw might as well be a million miles away for all the good they would do him.<p>

Chicken-Egg Man, as Desmond had mentally dubbed him, walked briskly ahead while the guard took up the rear. More than once the thought crossed Desmond's mind that he could probably lash out and kill the guard before he had time to raise his gun, but instinct told him that Chicken-Egg was extremely dangerous, and so for now all he could do was play along. Finally they came to a set of double doors. Chicken-Egg pulled one of them open and gestured for Desmond to go inside.

The room was almost as blank as Desmond's cell. The Templars seemed to like everything to be neat and white. There was only a large desk in the centre, with a chair on either side. There was a man in a white coat standing at the window, and bile rose in Desmond's throat as he recognised him, even with his back turned.

"Vidic," he spat. "Long time no see. Have you missed me?"

"Hardly, Mr Miles. Take a seat."

Desmond deliberately didn't move. After a few seconds, Vidic gave the smallest tilt of his head and the guard raised his gun and slammed the butt of it into Desmond's shoulder viciously. He cried out and staggered, and Chicken-Egg took the opportunity to grab him by the injured shoulder and force him down into one of the chairs.

"Your petty defiance may have been cute to your Assassin friends," Vidic said, turning at last and stalking over to the table. He placed his hands on it and leaned over. "Here at Abstergo we're not so easily impressed. We have ways of ensuring cooperation."

Desmond laughed in his face, laughed so hard and uncontrollably that some small part of him buried deep in his mind felt a stab of fear. "What are you going to do to me, Vidic?" he gasped. "You think you can fuck me up? I'm already more fucked up than you can imagine. Do your worst."

Vidic chuckled and Desmond felt an increasing sense of unease. The bearded man looked over his head and nodded at Chicken-Egg. Desmond heard the door open behind him and his heart sank as he heard the sound of two sets of footsteps, plus a third set of feet being dragged. The man that they brought around the table had a black bag over his head, but even before they sat him down in the chair and Vidic leaned over with that shit-eating grin and pulled it away, Desmond knew who it was.

He did his best not to show emotion as Clay winced in the sudden light. He looked groggy but unharmed, and Desmond suspected that he'd been given the chloroform treatment as well. He wondered how they had caught up with him, when Clay's new face was known only to a few, and the fact that he was still alive known to even less.

"I believe you two are ... acquainted already," Vidic said with a smirk, tossing the black bag onto the table.

"We worked together," Desmond said, keeping his voice casual. Clay looked up and their eyes met, and it was lucky that Desmond wasn't speaking when that happened because he knew the look in Clay's eyes would have shaken his voice.

"Is that what you call it?" Vidic asked in a soft, mocking voice, and Desmond shuddered almost imperceptibly. Who had known about the two of them? Who could have told the Templars? Rebecca, Shaun, his father ... or any one of the six or seven Master Assassins who had been in the safe house on the night they had returned, the night that he and Clay had made love and been none too careful about how much noise they made.

"Sir!" Chicken-Egg spoke suddenly, and Desmond turned to see him standing with one hand pressed to a communication device on his ear and a look of concentration. "The Masters from our Hong Kong division have just arrived. They wish to speak with-"

"Yes, yes, very well," Vidic waved a hand impatiently. "We should leave the two lovers to catch up anyway." He fixed Desmond with a cruel stare. "We will have guards stationed by the door. I imagine Mr Cross-" he gestured towards Chicken-Egg. "-Has already told you of where we will shoot you if you try to run. Walk with me, David."

Desmond filed the full name - David Cross - away for future reference as the two men left the room. There followed at least a full minute of silence as he and Clay stared at each other across the table.

"I'm sorry," Desmond said at last. "They wouldn't have come after you if it wasn't for me."

Clay didn't respond.

"How did they find you?"

For a moment he thought he wasn't going to get a reply, but then Clay spoke in a hoarse voice. "Don't know."

"Where did you go?"

"Places."

Desmond nodded, and then squeezed his eyes tightly shut at the tears he felt rising. "Clay," he said, his eyes still shut. "I think they're going to torture you."

Clay didn't say anything, but Desmond opened his eyes and saw the mask of the other man's expression crack a little.

"I think they'll use you to get me to do what they want. Either ... Either tell them about the Blackout, or the location of the Apple, or maybe they'll make me use the Animus again so they can get more information from my ancestors. I don't know what they want, but they're going to use you to get to me."

Clay nodded, once. "You can't give them anything."

"I don't know if I'll be able to stop myself. I can't ... I can't let them hurt you. You've been hurt too many times because of me. I can't..."

"Desmond," Clay interrupted, looking at him steadily, his gaze a little softer now. "This is more important than me. It's more important than you. Anything you give them now will be a weapon. A single word might be enough to get all of your friends killed. If they get their hands on an Apple, there will be no stopping them. You just sacrificed thousands of people to save this world. You can't risk it again just for the sake of one person."

"But..."

"I'm saying this now because they'll probably break me quite quickly, and after that they'll have me beg you to do what they want. The Templars have had millenia to perfect their torture techniques and I won't be able to stand up to them for long. You need to listen to what I'm saying to you now, and remember it no matter what I might be saying in a few days or weeks." He reached across the table and Desmond finally felt his touch again, felt the slide of those fingers over the palm of his upturned hand. "Desmond. Give them nothing. We can't let them win."

"Oh look, David, they're holding hands!" Warren Vidic called out vindictively as he and Cross re-entered the room. Cross was now carrying a small black case. Clay withdrew his hand quickly, but Desmond could still feel a tingling on his palm where his fingers had been. "This may be easier than we thought. Have you figured everything out yet?"

Desmond looked up the man with pure undiluted hate in his eyes. "There's no point in torturing him. I'll never give you anything."

Vidic stared at him for a moment and then laughed. Even Cross gave a small smile as he laid his case on the table. He lifted the lid and Desmond watched in dull horror as the man pulled out a meat cleaver with a razor-sharp edge.

"I believe you underestimate the pain of watching a loved one being tortured, Mr Miles. But we shall save that for another day. Today, we shall begin with a short, sharp shock."

Vidic nodded at Cross, who came around the table and suddenly lashed out and pinned Desmond's left hand down with an iron grip.

This finally triggered a strong reaction from Clay. He stood up abruptly, only to be forced back into his chair by a guard. "What are you doing?" he cried out.

"Present your ring finger, Miles," Cross hissed in Desmond's ear. "You want to be an Assassin? We'll make you one the old-fashioned way."

Desmond struggled frantically but Cross was much stronger than he looked. Vidic watched his efforts and smiled disparagingly. "Oh, Desmond. You do have an over-inflated opinion of yourself. Why should we bother now with some pathetic watered-down trace of First Civilisation DNA when we have the genuine article right here with us? You're nothing to me now but an insurance policy for the real prize."

"No!" Clay yelled, forcing a second guard to join the first as he fought against his restraint. "Leave him alone!"

"Ring finger, Miles," Cross repeated. "Stick it out or I'll take them all."

Barely conscious of what he was doing, Desmond curled in the fingers on his left hand, leaving only the ring finger sticking out. He stared at it. There hadn't been time to get the brand of the Assassins, so the skin was smooth and lightly tanned.

"Here is what we want from you, Mr Kaczmarek," Vidic continued. "You will use the Animus. You will show us the memories stored in that body and gift us with the technology of the First Civilisation. By doing so, you will save Desmond from the suffering that begins today. Mr Cross, kindly demonstrate."

Just as Desmond was thinking that there was no way this was really happening, the cleaver came down on his hand and he saw his finger disappear behind the reflective sheet of steel. He saw his own face mirrored on the blade, saw the shock and disbelief there. Then Cross lifted away the cleaver and Desmond pulled his hand away and hugged what was left of it to his chest, staring numbly at his severed finger as blood soaked through his shirt. He looked up at Clay, and the horror in the other man's face drove home the reality of what had just happened.

"This will continue," Vidic said simply. "It will continue, and you will watch it, Mr Kaczmarek." He waved a hand at the guards, turning away in a gesture of dismissal. "Take Subject 17 away."

The guards released Clay and he immediately vaulted over the table and grabbed Desmond by the shoulders, staring down at his bloodied hand.

"No!" Clay was saying. "This isn't right, this can't be..."

"Clay..." Desmond whispered urgently as the other man cupped his face, pressed their foreheads together and shed long-repressed tears. "Remember what you said to me ... You have to ... Have to stay quiet, no matter what. Can't give them anything. Promise me."

"I can't..."

"Clay, promise me you won't tell them!"

Vidic grew impatient. "Take them both away!" he shouted at the guards, who immediately began pulling at both of them

"I promise!" Clay said at last, through gritted teeth.

Desmond moaned as the numbness in his hand began to give way to dull pain. "I love you, Clay," he said for the second time, knowing that it needed to be said. There probably wouldn't be another chance. Then Clay was dragged from the room by the guards, kicking and swearing, and Desmond was left to curl up on the floor, losing consciousness as the blood spurted from the stump of his finger.


	14. The Basement

Clay had never wanted to find himself back in this room again. The Animus squatted in the middle of it like a malevolent toad, glowing softly with blue light, and he remembered crawling into it for what he had thought would be the last time. Vidic walked over to it and rested his hand on the monitor that was hooked up to it.

"So here we are again, Subect 16. Or I suppose we shall have to find a new name for you, now that you have that wonderful new body." He looked at Clay curiously. "I could hardly believe it when David told me. A real, live specimen from the First Civilisation. What a great pity it was you who ended up in control of it. You were always weak, Mr Kaczmarek."

Clay didn't respond.

"Right now Desmond is wounded, yes, but not beyond repair. We can give him painkillers and antibiotics, and we can probably even reattach his finger. We both know that you'll come around to our way of thinking eventually, so why not spare Desmond from any further pain? This could all be very easy."

Clay considered this. "What do you want from me?"

The Templar's tone quickly became very businesslike. "You will give us the locations of all the Assassin headquarters and safe houses that you have knowledge of, as well as the locations of any temples built by Those Who Came Before. You will tell us what you and your team did at the end of last year that caused the sky to go dark. You will use the Animus to explore the DNA of the body you currently inhabit, and follow our instructions to unlock the secrets and technology of the First Civilisation. In short, you will give us your unqualified cooperation in everything that we ask of you. In return, Desmond Miles will not be harmed."

"Will you let him go?"

"No."

_What you must do is clear. Help Desmond Miles._

_I will._

"Vidic," Clay said slowly. "Go fuck yourself."

Vidic rolled his eyes and took out his cell phone. He pressed one number and then lifted it to his ear. "Cross. He's all yours."

The two guards that Vidic had brought with him grabbed Clay by the arms and marched him roughly to his old quarters. The door slid open as they approached and as Clay was forced in he saw that it was changed. There was a large screen opposite the bed that covered almost the entire wall, and there was a single button set into the bottom edge of it.

"When you decide to play ball, press the button," Vidic told him coldly. "What is happening on the screen will cease. But you'd better be damn sure when you press it, or Desmond will pay the price."

The door slid shut and the screen lit up.

* * *

><p>"Cauterise it, we need him conscious."<p>

Desmond woke with a scream as red-hot metal was pressed against the stump of his finger. His blood sizzled and he could smell his own flesh burning. He'd never felt anything like this before, not even in the harshest parts of his training. He blinked and found that restraints were being tightened around his wrists and ankles. He was on some kind of metal bed, inclined slightly backwards, in one of Abstergo's many clinical white rooms. Cross was standing with his arms folded, watching him passively. Several other men stood around in white coats, an awful parody of healers. Desmond looked past them and saw a security camera mounted high on the wall. Whatever they were going to do to him, Clay was going to be watching.

With that thought in mind, Desmond battled not to let his fear show on his face. Perhaps it wasn't manly to be afraid of torture, but in truth he was terrified almost out of his mind. He was trapped, in the hands of the enemy, and the Assassins had no idea where he was. It was likely that he was experiencing his last few minutes of sanity before his mind was ripped away by whatever horrors the Templars had in store for him.

Though he didn't particularly want to know, he craned his head to try and spot any instruments of torture. There was a bucket of water and a towel nearby, presumably for cleaning up the blood when they were done. Desmond suddenly wished he hadn't read Shaun's notes on medieval torture devices so closely, as in his mind images of the Rack, the thumbscrews and the heretics fork flashed past in awful technicolour.

He heard a ringing and looked over to see Cross lift a phone to his ear.

"I see," he said, before hanging up. He addressed Desmond directly. "Kaczmarek has made his decision. For what it's worth, I'm sorry that it had to come to this."

"Yeah, you look real torn up about it," Desmond sneered.

He heard a a dripping sound somewhere near his head, and though it hurt his neck to do so he looked over and saw one of the other men dipping the towel into the bucket of water he had seen earlier. Cross walked over to a tap that was set into the wall and began hooking up a hose to it, and Desmond realised that the water wasn't just for cleaning up.

He was still afraid, but at the same time felt the tiniest bit of relief. Desmond didn't know much about waterboarding, but he knew that it was non-lethal and left no marks. Perhaps this meant that the Templars still wanted to keep him unharmed. If he could withstand this, then maybe he and Clay would survive for long enough to escape or be rescued.

"The feed is live," said a technician with a headset, and Cross nodded. Desmond saw one of the men approaching with the damp towel, and with a sudden new burst of panic looked directly into the lens of the camera.

"Clay, don't watch!" he yelled. "Look away! Don't watch! Don't w-"

He was cut off as a thick rag was thrust into his mouth and a towel was thrown onto his face and immediately tightened by someone pulling on it, twisting it into a tight knot. His head was tipped back and already he was struggling to breathe. He regretted not taking a gasp of breath while he still had the chance. He opened his eyes but could see only the light that seeped through the towel. His whole body felt electrified, tense, waiting.

Then the water hit his face.

* * *

><p>Clay knew he should look away, knew it would be easier to hold out that way, but he sat and the bed and stared at the screen, determined that if Desmond was to be the one who had to suffer, the least he could do was watch.<p>

The water hit Desmond's face. He lasted for about three seconds. Clay didn't last much longer.

The body on the screen started convulsing and spasming as Desmond tried to tear himself from his restraints. The sound on the video feed was loud, designed so that there would be no escaping it, and Clay could hear the awful gagging noises that Desmond was making. He leapt off the bed and pounded at the screen with his fist, screaming at them to stop, trying to drown out the choking sounds. The button was there, right there. He could make this stop. His chest hurt, his throat was already sore from yelling. And the button ... The button was right there...

They weren't going to stop. Desmond couldn't breathe and they were going to let him drown. Clay was watching him die in the slowest, cruellest manner possible.

Abruptly, Cross called out an order and the towel was pulled away from Desmond's face. Cross yanked the rag out of Desmond's mouth and leaned over him. He was whispering, but Clay could hear him.

"Tell him to talk. Tell Clay to talk. He can stop all this."

Desmond was coughing violently, water pouring from his nose and mouth. He could barely breathe, let alone speak. He turned his head to the side and vomited.

"You won't say it? You won't say it? Then we'll continue."

"No!" Desmond screamed, panicked, pulling at his restraints. "No! N-"

The rag was forced back into his mouth. The towel was wrapped around his head. Cross turned on the hose.

Within seconds Clay had his hand on the button, ready to push it, ready to stop this evil. He was so close to the screen now that he could make out the individual pixels of Desmond's limbs twitching. But he'd made a promise.

"_Fuck_!" he screamed, and slammed the heels of his hands against his ears, closing his eyes and trying to block out the horror on the screen. Seconds later he was staring at it again, desperate. They weren't stopping. Why weren't they stopping? He'd been under too long...

The towel was ripped away and Cross removed the gag from Desmond's mouth. Cross told Desmond to beg for mercy. Desmond turned his head and threw up. Cross stuffed the rag back into his mouth before he was done.

It continued for around fifteen minutes, but it felt like centuries. Not once did Desmond beg Clay for release. He barely said anything coherent. They probably would have continued for longer, but eventually Desmond's strength proved to be his undoing as he fought against his restraints. There was a stomach-turning _crack _as his wrist snapped, and Cross continued to pour the water for a few more seconds before tossing the hose to one side and signalling to one of his assistants to remove the towel.

Clay could see a faint sheen of sweat on Cross' forehead, but he looked no more disturbed than if he had just been doing a simple household chore. He unbuckled one of the restraints and the others did the same. As soon as he was free, Desmond curled up into a foetal position, sucking in huge gasps of air.

Cross looked at him for a moment, then grabbed Desmond's broken wrist and squeezed.


	15. The Button

**Introductory note:** _Thanks again to Death Escapist, evil-windful and FeliceMemoria for your reviews. In answer to the comment about Lucy, I just want to point out that I totally called that plot twist earlier in this story, and I reserve the right to be smug about it. Even if Brotherhood did drop massive hints about it anyway._

_I also want to give fair warning to anyone who would prefer to avoid excessively violent imagery. This chapter does get pretty rough, more so than last week. The worst of it comes after the second break, so if you want to skip that section then you can do so without missing out on too much of the plot._

* * *

><p>Desmond regained consciousness and immediately wished that he hadn't.<p>

After Cross was done with him, he'd been thrown into this room and left there. It was a cold, empty chimney of a room, taller than it was wide. At least, that was the impression he'd got in the brief moment he'd seen it in the light. There were no windows, no gaps around the door and no artificial light. Desmond was blind, and he was in pain.

His nose, throat, oesophagus and lungs were all burning, and each breath compounded the discomfort. The burnt stump of his ring finger was a bundle of screaming nerves. Worst of all was his broken wrist, swollen and throbbing with the kind of pain that Desmond had never even imagined before. It seeped through his body and into his mind, and as he stirred a barely coherent jumble of prayers and curses and pleas scrambled through his head. He wanted to pass out. He wanted to die. He wanted a heavy dose of painkillers, some bandages, a splint for his wrist, a warm bed. He was ready to sell his soul for any of these things.

Realising that there was no way he'd be able to sleep, Desmond pushed himself into an upright position, gritting his teeth and groaning with every movement. Leaning against the wall, he looked around fruitlessly, seeing only pitch black. Then, with a huge effort, he opened up his eagle vision.

The first thing he saw was the dried blood on the walls. Long splatters from where people had been punched repeatedly, pools on the floor from open wounds, messy circles on the walls where they'd obviously tried to knock themselves out or worse by breaking their heads open on the tiles. Then he began to see ghosts, imprints of the room's previous occupants. Some were clawing or banging at the door, others kneeled in prayer, but most of them were simply curled up like babies on the floor, rocking and crying or simply lying still.

Desmond lay down among them without bothering to close down his eagle vision. Even horrors like this were better than total sensory deprivation. He rested his wrist on the back of his other hand to support it, and waited for the door to open again.

* * *

><p>"I'm not seeing results, Cross," Vidic snapped accusingly. "You told me we'd have Kaczmarek bending to our every whim within five minutes. So far I've seen him making a lot of noise, but he still hasn't pushed that damn button."<p>

"It was a mistake to let the two of them meet first," Cross replied mildly. "It allowed them to reconcile, to reach a consensus."

"Don't tell me I'm the one making mistakes, when you're the one unable to wring a few simple words out of an untrained brat!" Vidic snapped back.

"I still maintain that the best approach would be to simply put a gun to Miles' head and give Kaczmarek an ultimatum."

"And if Kaczmarek calls our bluff? Either we kill Miles and lose all our leverage - as well as a valuable asset - or we don't kill him and show weakness."

"What about Kaczmarek's father? We could have him brought in easily."

Vidic shook his head impatiently. "I don't want to give the Assassins any indication that Kaczmarek and Miles are here, or we'll end up spending valuable resources to field rescue attempts. Those bastards still think both their precious heroes are on the run."

Cross nodded. "Then with your permission I'd like to step up our efforts with Miles to something a little more ... traditional. We have the expertise to do a great deal of physical damage without killing him, and quite frankly the original order to leave no marks has rendered us very limited in what we're able to do."

Vidic waved a hand dismissively. "You can break every bone in his body if you so choose. Try to keep his brain intact in case we need to put him in the Animus again, but Miles is not the priority here. Make Kaczmarek see reason."

"Very well. We'll begin immediately."

* * *

><p>Clay sat on the end of his bed, staring at the screen blankly as the screams filled the air around him. He'd given up hitting the screen with his fists and yelling. Now his battle was completely internal, and the button in the screen had become the centre of his universe.<p>

David Cross was removing Desmond's fingernails. There was a bunsen burner on a nearby table which he was using to heat a small blade. He would slide the blade underneath each nail and twist it, before using pliers to yank the rest of the nail out by the roots. So far he'd removed three of the fingernails on Desmond's right hand - the one attached to his horribly swollen and bruised wrist - and was moving onto a fourth. An assistant was holding the hand down onto the table by pushing down heavily on the broken bone.

The noises Desmond was making were inhuman.

"St-Stop..." he managed to gasp, the glowing blade millimetres away from his index finger. "Stop, I'll say it. I'll say whatever you want, just please stop..."

Clay blinked at last and looked at the screen as Cross hesitated, and then put the knife down on the table. Desmond sagged in relief as his wrist was released, and he clutched his mutilated hand to his chest, the flesh where his nails had been removed horribly red and raw.

Cross looked up into the lens of the camera with his cold, pale blue eyes. "Well, Mr Kaczmarek. I think Desmond has something he wants to say."

The camera zoomed in so that it was closer on Desmond's face, close enough that Clay could see the vein pounding at his temples. Cross grabbed Desmond by the hair and pulled his head upwards, whispering in his ear: "Say it."

"Fucking _Christ_, Clay, do what they want," Desmond sobbed. "Give them what they want ... Make it stop, _please_..."

"Press the button, Clay," Cross added loudly. "This can all end right now."

_You need to listen to what I'm saying to you now, and remember it no matter what I might be saying in a few days or weeks._

The seconds dragged out agonisingly. Cross tightened his grip on Desmond's hair. Again, Desmond cried out, begged Clay to end it, to give them what they wanted.

_You have to stay quiet, no matter what. Promise me._

_I promise._

"Last chance, Kaczmarek," Cross called out. "Press the button or we'll carry on until you do."

"Do it!" Desmond sobbed desperately. "Clay, _please_, I'll do anything..."

I _love you, Clay._

They couldn't let the Templars win. At all costs they needed to keep the Apple out of their hands. At all costs.

Clay pressed a hand against Desmond's image on the screen, and gritted his teeth. In all his life he had never felt so much self-loathing. At last he began to understand what Desmond must have gone through after killing the First Civilisation to save the world, and he would have given anything to run away from this.

"I love you, Desmond," he whispered. "I'm sorry."

Cross finally grew impatient. He threw Desmond's head back and picked up the blade again. Instead of heating it over the bunsen burner, he simply turned to Desmond and slammed the blade into his shoulder with full force. Desmond screamed, twisting in agony as Cross worked the knife in his shoulder, scraping it against his collarbone. He put his face very close to Desmond's ear, and his frustration revealed itself in the viciousness of his next words.

"Your boyfriend doesn't care about you, Desmond. You're down here dying and he won't even push a button to save you."

"Clay, _please! _Help me, make it stop, make it stop, oh god, make it stop..."

Cross yanked the blade out of Desmond's shoulder and placed it on the table. "Hand me the pliers, Henry," he said to his assistant. "Let's start on the mouth."

* * *

><p>William Miles sat at his desk looking very tired. Shaun Hastings stood in front of the desk apprehensively, looking down at the documents and photos that he had just placed on the Master's desk.<p>

"The bike definitely belongs to Desmond," he said, when the silence became too much to handle. "He, uh, changed his name and started using new official documents, but he never got a new motorcycle license or changed the plates."

"Where was it found?" Miles asked in a low voice.

"On the Bruce Woodbury Beltway, just outside Vegas. I did a little digging and it turns out that a bartender called Ezio Federico went missing recently. His boss called it in, said the guy had been experiencing ... personal problems."

William Miles nodded. "That sounds like Desmond. Only Desmond would come up with an alias that transparent. It's like he wanted to be found."

"Either that or he's just an id- uh, he lacked creativity," Shaun added, changing tack halfway through as he remembered who he was talking to. He took a deep breath before delivering the next bit of bad news. "It gets worse. I ... secured surveillance footage from The Siren - the bar where Desmond was working. The night before he went missing, I found this." He pushed a slightly fuzzy still from a CCTV camera across the desk. One of the faces in the crowd was circled in red pen. "That man is David Cross. He's a Templar, head of their Intelligence operations. I doubt he just stopped in for a pint."

William nodded wearily. "So we must assume that Desmond has been abducted again." He paused. "Any news on Clay Kaczmarek?"

Shaun hesitated and looked at William searchingly. "You think he had something to do with this?"

"I haven't ruled it out. What do we know?"

"A man fitting Clay's description showed up at the bar a few weeks before Desmond went missing. The bar owner says he walked in on them having some kind of argument. Clay stormed out looking pretty upset..." Shaun paused. "I know it doesn't look good, and personally I think the guy's an arsehole..."

"Shaun."

"But he's not a Templar, William," Shaun continued relentlessly. "He genuinely cared about Desmond. I can't think why, but..."

"Thank you for the information, Shaun," William interrupted smoothly, gathering up the photos and tapping them on the desk so that they slid together neatly. "We'll start planning an infiltration of Abstergo headquarters immediately. You know your duties."

Shaun nodded, but didn't leave straight away. "William ... Last time we were only able to spring Desmond because we had Lucy already working inside Abstergo. Even then, it was amazing that she managed to get him out with as little resistance as she did. How are we ever going to-?"

"I don't know, Shaun," William replied, looking down at the photo of David Cross. "I honestly don't know."


	16. The Phone Call

**Introductory note:** Oh no, I think I've been tempting fate. Right now there's a massive solar storm going on. We're all being hit by charged particles from a couple of massive flares earlier in the week. Could this be the endtimes?

* * *

><p><em>Six months ago...<em>

_Desmond stirred from a dream he couldn't remember and found that Clay was sitting by his bedside, looking down at him with a faint smirk._

_"Quit watching me, you fucking creep," Desmond grumbled, shielding his eyes from the lights of the Animus chamber._

_"You're in my bed, asshole."_

_"Huh?" Desmond looked around, and realised that he was lying on a pile of blankets instead of his usual camp bed. He sat up in alarm. "Shit. Sorry, man. Did the others..."_

_"Don't worry, no one else knows you're here." _

_"Where did you sleep?"_

_"I didn't."_

_Desmond sat up and rubbed his eyes, feeling unusually refreshed. He didn't usually feel this way when he woke up, especially after spending so long in the Animus. He stared at Clay. "You didn't sleep?" he repeated, unable to keep the concern and guilt out of his voice. "Was it...?"_

_"Don't worry, you didn't keep me awake. I just don't need to sleep as much as I used to." Clay looked at him thoughtfully. There was a moment of silence as their eyes met. Still slightly sleepy, Desmond reached out and touched Clay's face, caressing the cheek with his fingertips and brushing a thumb over his lip. Clay leaned into the touch like a cat and grinned in slow pleasure._

_"Now who's the creep?"_

* * *

><p>"Hang him," Cross had said.<p>

The room was dark, and Desmond could no longer use his eagle vision. His arms were twisted up and back behind him, bound together and attached to a rope that suspended him from the ceiling. The leather straps had been tightened when his wrist was less swollen, but now they were digging into the flesh, cutting him. If he stretched out with his feet just enough, he could touch the floor with his toes to take the pressure off, but he was too weak for that now. The muscles in his arms were tearing from the strain they were under. His head simply hung there, heavy, and blood dripped from his open mouth.

Cross hadn't pulled out his teeth. He'd simply taken the pliers to three of Desmond's molars and crushed them with brute force. They were now nothing but jagged edges and exposed dentin and nerve endings. Desmond hovered cruelly on the edge of unconsciousness, knowing nothing but pain. He could hardly believed that barely a month ago he had balked at the idea of suicide. He no longer wanted painkillers, or a warm bed. He simply wanted to die, to escape the prison of his body.

His arms creaked with the weight of his body. Desmond drooled blood and waited for death or Cross to claim him.

* * *

><p>"Did you sleep well?"<p>

Vidic asked the question with deliberate vindictiveness. They'd left the live feed of Desmond's cell, in the sickly green glow of the night vision, on the screen all night. Desmond had stopped making any kind of noise after the first couple of hours, and frequently Clay had wondered if he was even still alive. Echoes of the torture session had filled the silence, and Clay had been unable to close his eyes without hearing the awful wet crunch of Desmond's teeth giving way, or the ringing in his ears from the screams that had followed.

"Mattress not too uncomfortable, I hope? Room not too cold?"

Vidic gave every impression that he was enjoying this, but as Clay sat gripping the edge of the bed he could feel the other man's frustration. Vidic was not a patient man, and he'd obviously thought that Clay would cave long before this.

"Why don't you just torture me?" he asked in a low voice. "You saw how Desmond gave in, and he's stronger than me. Why don't you let him go and torture me?"

"We can't risk any damage to our most valuable asset. Besides, I have a personal disliking for Mr Miles. I'm more than happy to keep this up for as long as you see fit." Vidic chuckled. "I hear Mr Cross has some extremely imaginative things planned for today."

Clay tightened his grip on the edge of the bed, and then with a furious cry used it to launch himself at Vidic, headbutting the older man in the stomach and bearing him to the ground. Two guards immediately came running and grabbed him, but not before he landed a glorious, solid punch directly in Vidic's face and saw a satisfying splatter of blood burst out of the older man's nose. Then he was dragged away and the two guards raised their batons.

"No!" Vidic screamed, clutching at his nose. "Don't touch him, you idiots!"

"Do it!" Clay yelled at them. To encourage them, he jumped up and grabbed the head of the nearest guard, then whipped his head forward and bit down as hard as he could on the man's ear, grinding his teeth harder when he tasted blood. The guard howled in pain and suddenly Clay saw stars as a baton smacked him soundly on the back of the head. He released the man's ear and sank to the ground, trying to concentrate on not passing out.

Vidic was berating the guard who had hit him. "You moron! I should have you shot! Do you have any idea how valuable that body is? It's not a fucking piñata!"

"He was gonna bite my ear off," the guard replied feebly, holding on to the injured body part as blood trickled between his fingers.

"Then you should have let him! Your entire body is worth less to me than a single hair on his head. Get out of my sight, you're fired."

The guard fled, still clutching his ragged ear. Vidic stayed for a moment, breathing heavily, staunching the flow of blood from his nose as he looked down at Clay. Clay grinned back at him, feeling the blood start to dry on his chin.

"Look at you," Vidic said quietly. "The most miraculous find of the 21st century, and it's you who ends up in control of it? It's a disgrace." He shook his head and left the room, locking the door behind him.

As soon as he was gone the grin faded from Clay's face. He looked up at the screen, at Desmond's limp body.

"Hey, Desmond," he said hoarsely. "We sure learnt a lot of useful stuff from Ezio, didn't we."

Clay pulled Vidic's cell phone from his pocket, where he'd stuffed it during the chaos of the fight. He probably only had time for one phone call before Vidic realised it was missing, so he was going to make it count.

* * *

><p>Shaun was sat at his desk in the New York safe house, staring blankly at a map of known Templar strongholds in the United States. The most likely candidate seemed to be the main Abstergo headquarters where Lucy had worked and where Desmond had been taken originally. Shaun really didn't want to believe that was where they'd taken him again, because the Abstergo main building was probably one of the most well-guarded places in the world. He ran a hand through his short blonde hair, and as he brought his arm down again he checked his watch. It was past 9am, and he'd been up all night.<p>

He was literally nodding off at his desk when the buzz of his phone startled him awake. Groaning at the disturbance, he pulled it out of his pocket and checked the screen. He didn't recognise the number, but he'd been getting a lot of calls lately from someone with a heavy accent asking to speak to Mr Wang about his credit rating. He suspected that Rebecca had filled in some form online using his details.

Shaun rejected the call and tossed the phone onto his desk. He yawned and stretched his arms over his head. What he could do with right now was a nice cup of tea.

* * *

><p>Clay stared at the door in blank horror as he heard the click of the call being rejected. It had only rung twice.<p>

Frantically he dialed the number again and lifted the phone to his ear, all the while keeping one eye on the door. At some point Vidic would want to use his phone. It could be hours from now or seconds. He would search his pockets, find it missing, and it wouldn't take long for him to figure out where he'd lost it.

The phone didn't get cut off this time, but nor did anyone answer. Two rings ... a short silence ... two rings. Clay had twisted his fingers into his short hair, his heart pounding, muttering a mantra of _pick up, pick up, pick up_. Shaun's was the only number he could remember, if the historian didn't answer then the entire struggle had been for nothing. Calling the police was not an option; Abstergo as good as owned the police.

"Shaun, pick up the phone!" he screamed. "Pick up the phone! Answer your fucking phone you worthless English fuck..."

"-o is this? Who the hell do you think you are?"

Clay stopped yelling and nearly sobbed in relief. While he'd been shouting the ringing had stopped and Shaun had answered. He didn't sound very pleased about being yelled at but he was there.

"Shaun! Shaun, it's me, it's Clay!"

He heard a clatter that sounded suspiciously like a piece of furniture being knocked over, followed by another which he was sure had to be a mug of tea being set down. "Oh bugger, bugger, hold on..."

"Shaun, listen to me!"

"William! Rebecca! "He heard footsteps running and Shaun's voice was distant, like he was no longer holding the phone to his head. Clay stood up and kicked the side of the bed in frustration.

"Goddamnit, Shaun!"

"I'm here, I'm here!" the historian sounded breathless. "Where are you? Are you at Abstergo?"

"Yes! Yes, I'm here..."

"Is Desmond there?"

"Desmond is..." Clay looked helplessly up at the screen, at Desmond's twisted arms and swollen, bruised face. "Desmond is here. But he's in a bad way. They've been ... They've been torturing him, Shaun."

There was a pause. "Oh God. Right. William! Where are you? This place is like a bloody maze..."

"Send help, Shaun!" Clay shouted, trying to penetrate the historian's blustering. "You have to send help..."

Then, strangely, as if Desmond had heard him, he finally stirred. His breath was harsh, but his eyes were bright as they looked blindly around his cell. He looked desperate, furious, agonised. But at least he was alive.

"Help me!" Desmond started to scream. He cried out for help, over and over again, the word losing coherence and meaning. It was as though he had found the last gasps of air in his lungs and the last inch of his throat not already torn up by the water torture and screaming, and was using them to make a final plea for his life.

* * *

><p>The security guard was woken from his doze by the yelling and looked up blearily at the monitors in front of him until he found the Miles kid, twisting in his restraints and hollering his head off. It turned out to be very fortunate timing, since only moments later David Cross walked in. He looked at the guard's slightly guilty expression.<p>

"What's that racket? Is that Miles again? I thought I'd beaten that out of him." He studied the feed from Desmond's cell for a moment before continuing the thought. "I wonder how our friend Mr Kaczmarek is reacting to this."

He looked over to the other side of the bank of monitors, to the cameras hidden in Clay's room.

There was a moment of silence before Cross spoke again. Had the security guard been more poetic in nature, he would have said that the man's voice sounded like the metallic way the air smells just before a thunderstorm.

"Is that a cell phone?"

* * *

><p>Shaun listened to the sounds coming down the phone, his grip tightening almost enough to crack the casing. William finally came jogging down the hallway, slightly out of breath.<p>

"What is it, Shaun."

Shaun knew he should slowly and clearly explain what was going on but found himself unable to formulate the words. He held out the phone and whispered, "Desmond."

William looked at him, and then took the phone and lifted it to his ear. His expression didn't change when he heard Desmond's screams, but he went deathly pale and swallowed hard.

"Who is this?" he asked huskily.

"Oh, it's Clay..." Shaun began.

"Clay! Clay Kaczmarek!" came the voice down the phone. Shaun was standing close enough that he could hear the anguish in Clay's voice.

William breathed in sharply. "I see. Where is my son?"

"Abstergo. He's at the Abstergo headquarters, where he was being held before. You need to-" Clay was suddenly cut off and there was the sound of a scuffle, then a clatter as the phone hit the floor.

Shaun held his breath as William held onto the phone. After a few seconds he heard a different voice down the phone. It was tinny and distant, but it sent inexplicable shivers down his spine.

"Who is this?" the voice asked, echoing William's earlier question.

William hung up and handed the phone back to Shaun. He looked the historian in the eye. "Call the Assassin teams."

"Which ones?"

"All of them."


	17. The End

The screen in Clay's room was switched off, and somehow that worried him even more than the feed from Desmond's cell. After William had cut him off, David Cross hadn't said a single word. He'd looked down at the cell phone in his hand and obviously recognised it as Vidic's. Then, without looking at Clay, he'd left the room. That had been over six hours ago.

How long would it be before the Assassins were able to send help? Clay still wasn't entirely sure that help would ever even arrive. He had known William Miles for years without ever guessing that the man had a son, and even when the Mileses been reunited there'd been little evident affection shown by either of them. The only hint William had ever given that he truly cared for Desmond was in his poorly-concealed distaste for Clay, which had compounded over time as he began to guess that there was more than friendship between the two young men.

Clay tried to hold on to that, because all he was able to think of was where Cross would most likely be taking out any anger right now.

The door to his room slid open to Vidic, sporting a bandage on his nose and a face like thunder. "Get out here, right now!" he snapped, before Clay had a chance to say anything.

Without another word, he turned and walked back into the main room. Clay deliberately paused for a few seconds before standing up and strolling out of his room at a leisurely place. He noticed that the Animus was powered up and there was a low hum emanating from the computer servers on the raised platforms. Vidic was stood at the monitor next to the Animus, glaring darkly.

"Problem, Vidic?" Clay asked. "You look a little worked up."

Vidic glared at him. "From now on, for every word you say to me that I don't like, I'll have Mr Cross take a pound of flesh from Miles' hide. You seem to forget that he's still paying the price for your refusal to cooperate."

"Then we need to remind him, Warren," came a voice from behind them. Clay's turned and saw Cross walking in, followed closely by two guards who were dragging a body by the arms. It was Desmond. He looked much, much worse in the flesh than he had on camera. His eyes were open but unfocused, and when the guards released him he simply dropped to the floor and lay on his side. His ragged breathing filled the shocked silence that followed.

"Cross!" Vidic exclaimed angrily, taking a step closer. "What the hell are you doing? We agreed..."

"I'm no longer taking orders from you, Vidic. I went over your head. Our superiors weren't too happy when I told them that Subject 16 managed to leak critical information to the Assassins using your cell phone. Now we do things my way." As if given a silent cue, both the guards raised their guns and pointed them directly at Clay's torso, while Cross reached into his jacket and pulled out what looked like a steel knitting needle with a sharpened point.

"You've gone insane," Vidic breathed, staring at him. "Do you have any idea how important that body is?"

"I have authority to cripple it if Kaczmarek tries something. Which he may well do." Cross shoved Desmond with his foot so that he rolled onto his back. Clay felt a sensation like fire running through his veins as Desmond moaned weakly and attempted to lift a hand to defend himself from Cross. After hanging all night his arms were effectively paralyzed and his broken wrist was red and inflamed with the first signs of an infection. Coldly, like a butcher tending to a slab of meat, Cross lifted Desmond by the front of his shirt.

"You see this, Kaczmarek?" Cross said, raising the needle with his spare hand. "I made this myself. You see the notches here?"

Clay squinted at it and saw that there were indeed several indented grooves, about 3 inches from the sharpened tip. Without knowing precisely why, he suddenly felt very queasy, and mentally began trying to figure out if he could get to Cross and Desmond before the guards could cripple him with bullets. How much damage had they been permitted to risk?

"I made those notches myself," Cross continued. "I had to test it on quite a few people. I used it like a dipstick, only instead of checking the level of oil I checked the level of blood. I was using it to measure the distance between the intercostal cartilage of the sixth and seventh ribs on the left hand side to the surface of the pericardium. There are different notches, you see, for the different skeletal builds. I'd say that Mr Miles is probably a Category C."

With that, he slid a fingernail into one of the notches, touched the point of the needle to Desmond's lower chest, paused for a moment to check the positioning, and then drove it in quickly and with the precision of a surgeon.

After the horrifying speed of that single moment, everything seemed to slow down. Clay watched, numb, as Desmond howled and arched his back in pain, his fingers twitching spasmodically. He probably would have accidentally driven the weapon in further, had Cross not grabbed him by the shoulder and held him still with practised ease, keeping his fingernail locked tightly into the notch so that his fingertip was pressed hard against Desmond's chest. Somewhere nearby, Vidic was shouting, outraged, and there was someone else shouting too. Clay realised it was his own voice and somewhere deep inside he felt that old familiar release as his sanity abandoned him, the last strings of self-control holding him in place snapping like balsa wood. He ran forward, but Cross' guards met him halfway and dragged him backwards, slamming him against the Animus and holding him there.

"Attacking me is not a good idea," Cross said calmly. "Right now the point of this weapon is pressed against the outside of Desmond's heart. It hasn't pierced any vital organs yet. At this point all he has is a puncture wound, painful but not life-threatening. But with the slightest amount of additional pressure, the needle will pierce his heart and he will die."

It was as though every muscle in Clay's body was screaming at him to kill both the guards and then tear David Cross to pieces, but the truth of what the Templar was saying managed to penetrate his rage and fear. He might be able to overcome all four men in the room, but Desmond would die as a result.

"Desmond is hurt," Cross continued. "But given time he could recover from his wounds. We have access to the best medical facilities in the entire world. He could live for another fifty or sixty years, have children and grandchildren and die of old age, in his bed. Or he could die right now, in pain and misery. The choice is yours." To emphasise the point, he twisted the needle and Desmond moaned weakly. With great effort, he twisted his head to look at Clay.

"Clay," he whispered hoarsely. "Don't."

Desmond's eyes were dull now, barely able to focus, but Clay remembered all the other times he'd looked into those eyes. He'd seen them filled with uncertainty, confusion, guilt, despair, humour, curiosity and occasionally with something that he'd never quite put a name on. Clay remembered the warmth and vitality of Desmond's bare skin on those nights that they'd shared a bed. He thought about a little girl waiting for her brother, the koala farmer, to come and visit her from Australia.

Overcome by pain, Desmond let his head fall back again, and Clay let the consequences be damned.

"What do you want from me?" he croaked.

Cross gave a small smile, directed mostly at Vidic. "For now, tell me the addresses of any Assassin safe houses and bases of operation that you are aware of."

Clay did so. He had an excellent memory and in short order recited thirteen or fourteen addresses, most of them even with the postal codes.

"Who did you call on Vidic's phone?"

"I called Shaun Hastings. Then spoke to William Miles."

"Is Miles sending a team here?"

"I don't know."

That was when the hum of the computer servers died with a low whine, and the fluorescent lights of the room all went out.

* * *

><p>Cross had refused to let Desmond out of his sight, so one of the guards was applying pressure to the wound in his chest. The other was standing near Clay, glaring at him and keeping one hand on his gun. Desmond at least seemed to be conscious now, and was drawing in harsh but even breaths as he stared up blankly at the ceiling. The late afternoon sun streamed in through the windows with a soft orange glow, threatening the Templars with the cover of darkness that was not far away.<p>

A young Templar was trying to explain the situation to Vidic. His professional demeanour was not enough to totally conceal his fear.

"How goddamn difficult can it be to get the power running again?" Vidic snarled.

"Sir, the entire city has been affected for about 3 miles around in a circular pattern. We think some kind of EMP device was detonated. It shorted out every power unit in the building."

"Don't we have backup generators?"

"They ... They've been sabotaged, sir."

Cross, who had been pacing the room, stopped at that revelation. "They're already in the building." The young Templar, having completed his report, left the room quickly. The doors locked themselves behind him.

Vidic snarled in frustration. "We should have just shot Miles and tossed his body into the street as soon as they found out he was here. It might not be too late to do just that."

"Don't you fucking dare," Clay warned in a low voice.

"No, the time to do that would have been when I suggested it," David Cross said levelly. "If we'd given Kaczmarek this ultimatum when he'd first arrived then we wouldn't be facing this now." Before Vidic had a chance to respond, Cross turned his back on him and spoke to the guard tending Desmond. "What defences do we have set up around this room?"

"Sir, the door is sealed using multiple encryptions. Every member of the security team that we could reach via the field radios is stationed on this floor. All civilian personnel have been evacuated."

From somewhere in the distance, they all heard muffled gunshots. Cross didn't even flinch, but there was a weak, husky laugh from the floor.

"Getting ... nervous ... David?" Desmond hissed venomously. With a huge amount of effort, he'd managed to maneuver himself into a sitting position. HIs voice was thick because of his broken teeth but the sounds of the break-in seemed to be giving him strength.

Cross looked over a him dispassionately. "All that will happen today is that a large number of your people will die trying to save you. If anything, Kaczmarek did us a favour. It's much easier to wipe them out when they're throwing themselves at us. Usually we have to seek you people out, like the rats that you are."

Desmond laughed through gritted teeth. "You're really fuckin' terrified, aren't you?"

Cross narrowed his eyes and drew his weapon. Clay stiffened, but to his surprise found the muzzle of the Templar's gun pointed directly in his own face.

"What the hell do you think you're doing?" Vidic yelled disbelievingly. He took a step towards Cross, only to find the gun pointed at him.

"Shut up, Vidic. Just shut the fuck up!" Cross growled, and Clay felt a fresh stab of fear. The mask was finally falling away, and he had a horrible feeling that the man's monstrosity - usually refined and shaped to a razor point by reason and self-control - was about to reveal itself in a far more devastating form. "This is all your fault. We are fucked, you hear me, Vidic? This entire operation is fucked."

Vidic laughed at him snidely. "Don't be a fool, David..."

Cross shot him. The bullet hit Vidic in the cheek and Clay could have sworn he heard it rebound a couple of times inside the man's skull. He dropped like a stone, killed instantly.

The two guards exchanged a fearful glance, and the one guarding Clay wavered uncertainly. He made the poor decision of pointing his own gun at Cross, and was rewarded with a bullet in his eye. He'd been standing so close that Clay felt the warm spatter of blood on his face as the man was thrown backwards.

The remaining guard wisely decided to stay where the was, applying pressure to the wound in Desmond's abdomen. He watched Cross like a rabbit staring into a bright light and not knowing if it was simply a hiker with a powerful torch or an eighteen-wheeler truck. Luckily for him, Cross' mad eyes were fixed solely on Clay.

"I think..." he said with an eerie smile. "I think you'll be more cooperative on a mortician's slab. They'll understand. Especially after I explain how you killed Warren." His finger tightened on the trigger. Behind him, Clay saw the sliding doors shudder a little.

"No..." Desmond wheezed, and Clay caught his eye again at long last. Knowing it might be the last chance he'd ever get, he tried to put as much as he could into the gaze. He tried to communicate how sorry he was for not saving Desmond, for allowing all his suffering, for letting it end like this, for walking away from The Siren on that last night. There would be no reprieve this time, no Animus to use as an artificial afterlife. If Cross shot him now, he would die and stay dead.

Whether Cross would have done it, Clay never found out. The double doors slid open and Shaun Hastings took less than a second to register the tableau in front of him before aiming his already-raised gun and firing three bullets into the Templar's back. They went straight through him and Clay saw the holes materialise horribly in David's chest before the man was thrown forward by the impact and landed heavily on the ground, where he lay unmoving.

Rebecca Crane came running in close behind, followed by William Miles and two Assassins that Clay didn't recognise. He felt a stab of relief in his chest and looked back at Desmond, smiling. They were saved.

But Desmond wasn't smiling. Desmond was staring at him, and the expression on his face was all wrong. It wasn't joy, elation, or even anger. It was disbelief and horror.

Clay's brow furrowed as he tried to figure out what was wrong. He thought back to what had just happened. He remembered Shaun bursting through the door, firing his gun, the three shots slamming into Cross and knocking him down. Shaun...

Shaun was staring at him as well. Slowly he raised a hand to cover his mouth. His eyes were opened very wide.

Cross had gone down. But the bullets ... The bullets had gone through him.

Clay's heart sank as his mind gradually pieced the truth together. He lifted his hand and began searching the front of his shirt. He found the first hole on the right side of his stomach, and the other two higher up in his chest. As he touched each of them, he felt a sudden chill start to blossom out from where the bullets had struck him, until his entire torso felt cold.

His knees hit the floor and he toppled over onto his side. He saw Desmond force himself to his feet with inhuman effort and stagger a few steps across the room until he fell down again about five feet away. He reached out with a hand, the one with the missing finger. His mouth was moving but Clay couldn't hear any noise. It was as though all the sound had been sucked out of the world and he felt very, ver-


	18. Toronto

**Introductory note: **There will be a short epilogue but apart from that, this is the end of the story. For reals this time, I can't go on writing sequels! Thanks to everyone for reading and reviewing.

* * *

><p><em>"Meanwhile Daedalus, hating Crete and his long exile, and filled with a desire to stand on his native soil, was imprisoned by the waves. 'He may thwart our escape by land or sea,' he said. 'But the sky is surely open to us: we will go that way: Minos rules everything but he does not rule the heavens'."<em>

**Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book VIII**

* * *

><p>Desmond could feel himself starting to lose consciousness and fought hard against it. His attempt to reach Clay had sapped the last of his energy and the ensuing tumble had managed to jar every one of his injuries. He struggled to focus on Clay, who was lying on his side with his eyes closed in a rapidly growing pool of blood, but then Rebecca ran over and started frantically applying pressure to the gunshot wounds, obscuring Desmond's view of the fallen man. He felt a hand on his shoulder and realised that it was his father.<p>

"Desmond," he said softly, his eyes assessing his son and taking in the damage that had been done to him. "It's OK, son. We're here to get you out."

Desmond tried to gasp Clay's name, but there was too little moisture in his throat and blackness was threatening the corners of his vision. He couldn't see what was going on, but he could see the pool of blood creeping closer to him.

"Shaun," Rebecca called out through gritted teeth, her expression serious. "A little help here?"

Shaun had been standing there, one hand to his mouth, still in obvious shock. At the sound of his name he darted over to Rebecca and pressed the heel of his hand against the wounds in Clay's chest, as Rebecca did the same to the one in his stomach.

"Oh God," Shaun was saying. "Oh God, is he going to..." He couldn't finish the sentence.

"I don't know," Rebecca replied in a clipped voice, and Desmond saw a bead of sweat roll down the back of her neck as she tried to assess the damage. "How's Desmond?" she called over her shoulder.

"We need to get him some medical attention right now," his father replied, squeezing Desmond's shoulder with one hand. "Bring a stretcher up," he said to the two Assassins he'd brought with him. They left without a word.

Desmond desperately tried to conjure the effort required to shake his father off. He couldn't let them take him away. He couldn't leave Clay.

"I can't stop the bleeding!" Shaun called out in a panicked, anguished voice. "I can't stop it, he's..."

"Let me take a look," Rebecca said, gently prying his hand away. Desmond saw a fresh spurt of blood cascade over her fingers. She breathed in sharply.

"What? What is it?" Shaun demanded.

Rebecca paused for a moment. "One of the bullets is lodged in his pulmonary artery. There's nothing we can do."

"_No_!" Desmond howled, somehow finding his voice again. The words hurt him far worse than any torture Cross had inflicted. They hit him like a physical blow and he renewed his efforts to reach out to Clay.

Shaun was looking around wildly. His eyes alighted on the machine next to him. "The Animus. We can get him into the Animus! He can do ... whatever it was he did before. We can preserve his consciousness, find him a new body..." But the power had been cut, and the Animus and all the computer servers were still dead.

"Shaun," Rebecca said gently, taking her hand away from Clay's chest and touching the babbling historian on the arm. "Shaun, he's gone. I'm sorry."

Silence washed over the room. Rebecca moved aside and pulled Shaun away. He didn't resist, and didn't even seem to register that he was being moved. Desmond stared at the eerily still body, with its familiar messy hair and pale skin, now paler than ever. It was the last thing he saw before losing consciousness and it left a scar on his mind that would make its presence known in his nightmares for years to come.

* * *

><p>It took eight hours of medical care from the Assassins' most skilled doctors to get Desmond out of the woods. They drained the fluid from his swollen wrist and set the bone, stitched up the puncture wound in his chest, hooked him up to an IV to rehydrate his body and set a layer of resin over the exposed mess of his broken teeth to reduce the worst of the pain and prevent infection. He'd been doped up on various painkillers ever since he'd first been put in the ambulance, and now he was in a warm bed.<p>

Dimly, he realised that there was someone by his bedside. He blinked a few times until the fog abated enough for him to make out Rebecca's face. She was affecting a brave smile but the muscles in her face were tense.

"Hey, Des," she said gently. "Feeling any better?"

Desmond assumed she was asking about his physical wellbeing. "Yeah," he replied huskily.

Rebecca hesitated for a moment before continuing. "I don't know if anyone told you, but ... They brought Clay's body back. I wanted them to give him a proper burial but the head honchos said they want to keep the body for testing. I persuaded them to delay the autopsy, though, to give you a chance to say goodbye..."

"It's not Clay's body," Desmond interrupted in a hollow voice. "It never was."

Rebecca didn't respond to that. She obviously didn't know how to. It didn't matter. Desmond felt a pain fill his chest, a pain that he knew the morphine would never be able to touch. He closed his eyes in the hope that Rebecca would assume he'd passed out, and sure enough she stayed for only a few more minutes before placing a kiss on his forehead and leaving.

* * *

><p>It was the warmest part of the summer, and in the Toronto climate that meant that Shaun was sweltering even in a light, short-sleeved button-down shirt. As a concession to the weather, he'd undone the top button and had reluctantly stowed his favourite gray jumper away in his bag. He was still jet-lagged from having flown into a time zone that was five hours behind the one he was accustomed too, and after eighteen hours of daylight he was quite looking forward to seeing a sunset.<p>

He stepped off the train at Union Station and quickly made his way to the subway. He wasn't surprised to hear that Desmond had moved here after everything that happened, since his mother and sister lived in a nearby suburb. What was surprising was that Toronto was now the Assassins' centre of operations, and the Animus 2.0 was now in their new uptown headquarters, near Casa Loma.

Their position was currently strong. During the rescue operation at Abstergo they had managed to make off with terabytes of crucial information about the Templars' operatives and projects, including all the information gleaned from the test subjects they used in the Animus. Just before they'd left, one of the technicians had downloaded a virus into all the Abstergo computers that corrupted and deleted a great deal of their memory. Upon returning, their researchers had to set to work picking apart everything they had found out.

Shaun hadn't been among them. Within three days he was back in England, staying with his parents. They must have known that something was wrong, but thankfully hadn't asked him what it was. Soon he began working with another Assassin team in Scotland, analysing possible artifacts from the First Civilisation that had been found in an archeological dig.

Then one day he'd come into the lab and found a thick envelope in his in-tray. It was that envelope which had brought him back.

* * *

><p>Desmond was sitting at his desk, staring at his laptop screen, when the doorbell rang. He looked up, immediately tense. He'd only moved into the apartment about a month ago, and not many people knew yet that he lived here. He stood up slowly, running a hand over his face to stroke the beard that had grown in without him noticing or caring much. Then he made his way to the door.<p>

He opened it cautiously, keeping the chain latched and peering out through the crack. When he saw Shaun's blond hair and nervous expression he grunted, closed the door, slipped the chain off and opened it fully, stepping aside to let the other Assassin enter.

Closer to, he realised that Shaun didn't just look nervous. He looked downright scared, and the fear was mixed up with a mess of other emotions. He had slight dark hollows under his eyes and looked like he had aged several years in the past few months. Unlike Desmond he was clean-shaven, but he had slipped with his razor a few times that morning and left behind small red nicks.

"You look like hell," Desmond said candidly. "You want some coffee?"

Shaun shook his head. He was watching Desmond carefully. "You look ... well," he lied feebly.

Desmond smiled without much warmth. "Shaun, no offence, but you kind of freak me out when you act all pleasant. Could you do me a favour and call me an idiot, just so I know you haven't been replaced by a pod person?"

Shaun rubbed the back of his neck, but didn't say anything.

"It wasn't your fault," Desmond continued firmly. He'd been preparing himself to talk about this, and he wasn't about to break down in front of Shaun. "What happened to Clay was an accident. I don't blame you, and you shouldn't blame yourself."

Whether Shaun believed him or not was impossible to tell, but he at least relaxed a little. "What happened to you, after the rescue?" he asked. "Why did you come up here?"

Desmond shrugged. "I wanted to be near my mom and my sister. And I needed to get away from my dad. You know..." He smiled a little at the memory, though it had been anything but funny at the time. "While I was still laid up in the hospital, he came to see me. He tried to comfort me by saying that he thought Clay had been a Templar all along."

Shaun laughed bitterly. "He said the same thing to me. I nearly whacked him for it." Desmond turned and began filling the kettle to make himself coffee, but he could feel Shaun's eyes preying on him. The historian took a deep breath before continuing. "I'm ... I'm so sorry, Desmond. You have ... I ... You can tell me it wasn't my fault but I charged in there and started shooting like an idiot, and it got ... It got Clay killed." He swallowed hard, took his glasses off and rubbed at his eyes. "I killed him, Desmond. It's good of you not to blame me for it, but it doesn't change the facts."

Desmond replaced the kettle and flicked the switch. He kept his gaze fixed on the floor. He thought about Arthur, clenching his tiny fists as he slept in the Animus. "I know, Shaun. I know all about guilt." He took a deep breath and shook his head. It was an old habit of his - a method that he used to temporarily chase away the bad memories. "So I guess you're here because you got my letter?"

"And your thesis, yes. It's funny, Desmond, but I never would have pegged you for the thesis-writing sort."

Desmond concealed a smile. Shaun couldn't quite break the habit of taking the piss out of him. It was a good sign, a sign that he had alleviated the historian's pain a little. "What did you think?" he asked.

Shaun hesitated for a moment. "It was ... interesting. More emotive than a scientific paper really should be, but perhaps the scientific approach isn't altogether useful when it comes to First Civilisation technology. I think that's the point you were making, actually."

Desmond nodded. "I think that what they figured out was that technology and spirituality don't always have to be at odds with one another. Look at the shield they built to protect the Earth from the solar flares; it was powered by the psychic energy built up by the years that they'd spent in the Animi. You could almost say it was powered by souls."

Shaun was looking at him hesitantly. The historian perched on the back of Desmond's couch and folded his arms. "This business of souls..."

"I know how it sounds," Desmond interrupted. "We say that what we experience in the Animus is the genetic memory of our ancestors. I think that's just another way of saying that we carry echoes of their souls inside us. We both know that the Animus isn't like any kind of computer we've ever seen before. We had to make massive adaptations to the design just to get it to cooperate with our primitive software, but the core of the Animus runs entirely on First Civilisation programming. That's why I need your help."

Shaun looked taken aback. "I'm not really a programmer, Desmond. I deal more with tactical support and research. You need Rebecca..."

"Rebecca's in Europe right now, and I'd rather not bring her into this." Desmond remembered the last, angry conversation that he'd had with Rebecca, and felt a pang of regret. "She never really liked Clay," he explained. "I know that you didn't like him either, and Dad hated him. I don't think many people liked Clay. He just ... rubbed them up the wrong way. Sometimes I wonder if I was the only person who ever really liked him..."

He suddenly caught hold of himself. He shouldn't do this. He shouldn't dwell. Shaun was looking at him with that same expression that people always got when he tried to talk about Clay. The fact was that Clay Kaczmarek was an outsider even in death, and most of the Assassins seemed to want to pretend that he'd never even existed. Attempts to talk to people about him always ended up with Desmond babbling into an awkward silence.

"You read my conclusions, so you know I'm most of the way there," Desmond continued, getting back on track to Shaun's visible relief. "But I need your help. I need someone on the outside when I'm in the Animus, someone I can trust." He took a deep breath. "Plus, you're smarter than me."

Shaun gave a smirk that seemed to lift the weight of the past year from his face. "I'm not arguing with that," he said. "So, when do we begin?"

* * *

><p><em>Two years ago...<em>

_Clay could feel himself becoming light-headed as the blood poured from the wound in his throat, and as all other distractions began to fall away he found himself left with one thought. Its clarity focused him and gave him strength, it was like having all the water drained away from a muddy pool to reveal a pearl left at its centre._

_The thought was this: he was not ready to die._

_Clay staggered to his feet, knowing that his only chance of freedom and salvation now was the Animus. He fell as he neared it, but managed to catch the edge with one hand and pull himself up. With the last reserves of his strength, he lay himself down in the machine and powered it up._

_He wasn't sure why he was doing this. It wasn't simply fear. It was as though some part of him knew that he had more life to experience, though what kind of life that might be he couldn't imagine. It had been a long time since he'd been able to envisage any kind of true happiness in his future._

_He closed his eyes and and felt the flow of blood start to slow down along with his heartrate. Death had come to claim him, and he could feel its grasping fingers creeping up his body._

_So Clay Kaczmarek cheated._


	19. Epilogue

_"Nothing is true. Everything is permitted."_

**The Assassin's Creed**

* * *

><p>...<p>

...

Usr="DMiles" Cmmnd="access Animus archive system 233011a"

Processing...

Access granted.

Usr="DMiles" Cmmnd="access imgarchive"+"label=Subject16"

Processing...

...

Access passphrase-restricted: Enter passphrase as command

Usr="DMiles" Cmmnd="appleofeden"

Processing...

ERR 525: 0% passphrase synch

Enter passphrase as command

Usr="DMiles" Cmmnd="templar"

Processing...

ERR 525: 0% passphrase synch

Enter passphrase as command

Usr="DMiles" Cmmnd="prawn"

Processing...

...

...

Access granted

Archived image unlocked

Usr="DMiles" Cmmnd="boot from imgarchive"

Recovering...

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><p>He felt a creeping awareness of a new environment as pieces of himself began to flock together to form a cohesive whole. He gained eyes, and saw the familiar gentle glow of the Animus core program. He gained arms, legs and a torso, and it surprised him to find that there were no cuts upon them ... though he couldn't think why. Finally he acquired memory, slowly at first, and then all in a rush. He fell to his knees, overwhelmed by it, searching for something to hold onto. Amid the memories came a number, a name: Subject 16, Clay Kaczmarek...<p>

With the memories came the madness, and he began speaking under his breath, reciting numbers to try and keep himself sane. He remembered bleeding from his throat, and climbing into the machine. He remembered taking everything that defined him, every memory, every fear, and transforming it into data that could be read by the Animus, stored by it, and saved by it. He had a mission ... He had a task ... He had to ... He had to help...

He felt an arm touch his gently and he started in alarm. There was a man crouched at his side. His face was familiar, and Clay realised that he had seen photos of him before. He looked so much like Ezio, and so much like Altair, right down to a curious scar that split his lip and his missing ring finger. This man was...

"Desmond Miles," Clay murmured, temporarily interrupting the string of numbers and words that had been falling from his lips. "Desmond Miles." His brow furrowed as he remembered the words spoken to him through his ancestors. "I'm supposed to help you."

The man smiled, then laughed, then reached out with one hand. "No," he said. "I'm going to help you."


End file.
